Copyright, Schmopyright

It's been another regular week in the life of Sam Jackson's Secret Video Diary. First my computer blew up (as documented in the post below), then later I managed to take out quite a bit of equipment at 2nd Sense post production just by turning it on. Ooops. The documentary had an inexplicable bit missing (the bit where I was explaining how everything goes wrong, as it happens), and there was apparently no way to retrieve it with my PC in bits.

As I say, just another ordinary week in this production.

So why am I still doing stuff to the films anyway? In a word, copyright. We had the music rights to six commercial tracks for our festival screening, but this was no use for a general release. It took a full 18 months to get people to allow us to use their tracks on a percentage basis of receipts, rather than an upfront payment we could never afford. Indeed, more than one person in the industry has told me that them doing this at all is "unprecedented", and they are not intending to ever do it again! It's amazing where persistence and sheer bloody-mindedness can get you.

A long way, but not as far as I'd have liked, in truth. Not everyone played ball. It was a real shame in the case of Basement Jaxx. The band's manager was incredibly helpful, and even came to our Raindance screening. The record company and publisher were both great too. So what was the problem? It turns out that the track (Red Alert) used a sample from a band called Locksmith. Their publisher was great... but their record company simply didn't want to know. It felt such a waste... the goodwill of everyone else in that long chain of people was for nothing.

But copyright is more than music. We'd naively made reference to a national newspaper in our festival version, which the paper has taken great offence to. So this week meant replacing any verbal or visual references to them, as well as laying down the full new soundtrack with various bits of music replaced (and also taken the opportunity to do a shiny new slightly more cinematic sound mix).

And then there was the updated closing credits. Our list of actual crew is tiny, like many low budget films I guess, but even more so since we were effectively using a documentary crew of 3 rather than a full drama crew of 25. But our list of thankyous is perhaps longer, and certainly not exhaustive. Without many of the people and organisations credited, there really wouldn't be any film at all. Note to self... rather than be bitter about the few people who haven't played ball with us, perhaps I should think a bit more about that huge list of thankyous at the end of the film.

This insane week in particular, having caused them so much grief, I should especially big up Steve, Richard, Tudor, Joe and John at 2nd Sense... cheers fellas. And sooooory!