Allowing actors to use footage for demo reels (while maintaining control of content)

[Mark Suszko]

Watermarking the footage is a simple process that doesn’t keep it from being useful in an acting “reel”, but makes it useless to a competitor. I’d tend to be generous to the actors and give them as much of their “scene” as they need to demonstrate their craft, as long as it’s watermarked in some way. For short things like PSA’s and commercials, they should have the right to show the spot in their own reels, as long as it has a disclaimer supered over it; “by permission of”.

[Todd Terry]

I feel ya, and am intimately familiar with what you are up against there.

I’ll also (rarely) differ a little bit with Mark on the “what to do” opinion….

We too hire tons of actors, deal with several dozen talent agencies throughout our region, and scads of individual actors, too… and yes, they want our stuff for their reels. We are always happy to make it accessible, free and unrestricted.

You are in a different boat with your company and your legal team. I’m ALL for helping people, and try to do that… but in this case I think the far easier solution would simply be to tell actors footage isn’t available for reel use.

Why the harsh stance? Well, because I think it would be making a lot of work for yourself, for something that would have little value to the people you are trying to help…

I look at tons and tons of reels directly from actors, from agencies, from breakdown services, etc…. I don’t know of any “real” actors, except maybe those the very lowest of the lowest rung on the ladder trying to gain experience, that would ever even use a watermarked clip. Well, at least not a heavily watermarked clip (you’ll see a small corner network bug sometimes, and those are fine). I know of several agencies that refuse to build reels with timecodes on them as well.

Limiting the number of seconds isn’t super practical either… since you said “seconds” that makes me think your legal people are thinking something very short. As a director when I watch reels I hate to see compilations with very short clips, I like longer segments in order to really be able to see what a talent can do. You’ll really only see those when an actor has done a ton of work and might include a montage of a number of different short things, just to show they are out there working and have done a lot of projects. If someone is willing to use watermarked or timecoded footage, then they probably haven’t done a lot of work, so very short clips aren’t likely to be useful.

As to indicating where the clips can and cannot be posted… well of course you can tell an actor that, but once the horse it out of the barn there’s no bringing it back it, once you hand off a clip to an actor it’s going to be out of your hands and you will have zero control over where it ends up getting posted.

Putting a lot of complicated restrictions and rules-to-follow is not going to be an easy thing. I say this next part out of love, and because many moons ago before I was a wannabe movie director I was a wannabe actor myself so I think I can say this about my thespian brethren…. actors, typically, are not the sharpest knives in the drawer. I’ve worked with some that were practically Anthony Hopkins on camera, but if you take a break you hope they can find their way from the bathroom back to the stage. Sure there are plenty of super smart actors… but a lot of times it just comes with the territory, a sort of left-brain/right-brain thing… people who are wildly talented and super creative are often not type-A meticulous people who are the best at following complicated rules and restrictions.

So… me, personally in that situation although it sounds harsh I’d probably just let talent know in advance that the client restricts use of this footage and it is not available for personal reels.

Or better yet, can you convince the legal types there to just lighten up? Are the content owners there really genuinely and seriously worried about “losing control of very expensive content” and the fact that it shows up on an actor’s reel really damaging in any way? If they can see that in all likelihood it really isn’t an issue at all, maybe that’d solve the problem for everyone.

T2

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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Freddie Patane]

Thanks for the immensely helpful information!