Well, it's done.
You planned out your script.
You wrote it.
You cast it.
You shot it.
You edited it.
You put titles on it.
A couple more things to talk about: music, for one.
If you're just going to burn this to a DVD and show it to your friends, and that's as far as it's ever going to go, then grabbing the theme from Superman or Raiders of the Lost Ark and putting it under your dialogue track is fine.
As long as that's as far as it's ever going to go.
If you ever decide to enter it into a contest, or upload it to YouTube or Google Video, then you have a problem. Because, under copyright law, you don't have permission to use that music.
You could get your video yanked from YouTube or Google Video. You could get a "cease and desist" letter from the law firm representing Paramount Pictures (in the case of Raiders), or Time Warner (in the case of Superman). You could get sued.
Don't gloss this over... Disney/ABC, for one, is VERY protective of its trademarks and copyrights, and has gone after a small day care for having "unlicensed" likenesses of copyrighted Disney characters as outside decorations on their building.
My solution? Royalty-free music.
Most music for films requires licenses: A "performance license" is an agreement between the filmmaker (you) and the performer for a flat fee, a percentage of any money made with the performance, or both. "Sync rights" means that the filmmaker (you) is agreeing to a license to use a musical composition in a "timed relation" (it's going to be the same each time it's seen) in a visual presentation. If you're talented enough to make a new recording of a piece of music, you need "mechanical rights", which is a license from the copyright holder, and means paying fees and royalties.
Royalty-free music, on the other hand, is either acquired (in the case of totally royalty-free music) or purchased from the composer. That purchase price gives you a license with all these rights with no further payment involved.
If you Google® "royalty-free music", you'll find any number of sites that offer original compositions for reasonable prices. However, if you're downright stingy, like me, there are places where you can get royalty-free music FOR FREE. Peter John Ross, at Sonnyboo.com offers a selection of pieces he wrote (he's a musician, too... when you got it, you got it) for free, with the only stipulation that he gets a credit line in your film. Kevin MacLeod at Incompetech.com also provides free music, under the Creative Commons license. This basically means, as they explain it on their website, that this is their way of maintaining their copyright, but releasing some of the rights of their work to the public use. They see it as a midway point between copyright (all rights reserved) and public domain (no rights reserved). [Editor's note: You can also find a selection of Indpenedent artists and composers here at MFM in our Music for Indie Films Links section who are willing to let you use their film for no cost unless your film makes money, at which point you would give them a pre-determined percentage (usually 1%) up to a predetermined amount.]
Either way, this is something to keep in mind... you don't want a lawsuit, because they never fit properly.
Sorry... I'll try to keep the "puns"-manship under better control...
Now, when you burn your final edit to DVD, don't forget to make one you can do on the Web... Google Video, YouTube, and many others use Flash Video format, from Adobe, and they convert your video of 100 megabytes or less into Flash Video to play on YouTube. Here's a neat trick... if you convert it to Flash Video before you upload, you have better control, and the video can be bigger! There are all sorts of freeware and shareware programs to convert video files to Flash Video, so I leave that exercise to the reader.
You can also, as I do, post your own videos to your own website, but that's an advanced topic we'll go into some other time.
(The preceding article has been excerpted from the blog, “Madman Al’s Midnight Movie Mania” with submission and permission from Al “Uncle Al” Bouchard.)
