How to Make an Indie Film - Scripts & Copyrights in Indie Filmmaking

Hello, I’m Corey Turner here on behalf of Expert Village.com and today we are talking about low budget movie making. There are two ways to handle the scripts. One is somebody else has a great script and you think it is incredible. You got a friend that has written a good script and you decided to make it. That’s fine. First thing you want to do is make sure that person owns the rights to that script. You sure don’t want to spend all this time making your movie and find out at the end there is somebody else that is claiming ownership of. So you want to have a contract with that person from the very beginning that is going to stipulate that they own the copyrights to that script, that they are able to transfer that to you and also what compensation are you going to give them. From the very beginning go ahead and discuss what they are going to get back in points. Are you paying them a little bit of money? Are you giving some kind of producer credit as long as they are with their screen writing credit? These are things you want to address at the beginning so that you have them handled. Also we are all artists and everybody wants the best product. The writers are no different. Some times they don’t like you making changes to their script but you will find as you get on set, as the cameras are rolling and as the actors are bringing new influences you are going to need to make changes and you don’t want to continually go back to the screenwriter to make sure that you can do that. So you need to address up front that you have creative control and can make the changes needed to make the project a success.