Full Rights
 

I have been asked by a friend to do a martial arts instructional video. He is wanting to sell these videos. Do I charge him cost of video and per copy of video to sell or should I just charge him just the video at a higher rate will full rights (let him do whatever he wants with the video).

Based on having done this before, and not made a penny on sales compared to my expenses, if I had to do it again, I'd charge my hourly rate up front and they can have full rights to it.

Also having done this before, (also a martial arts instructional video and also for a friend) my personal recommendation is to go with settling on a price and services up front with full rights going to the customer rather than any ongoing residuals.

The customer being your friend makes this even more important.

A few reasons:
1- You never want to be in a situation where you feel you need to question a friend on if you are being paid the proper percentage on sales. Also, you don't want to deal with how to handle price changes over time, what about give-aways and promotions. etc.

2- With your friend getting full rights, he/she is free to handle sales and promotion anyway they see fit, without being concerned about factoring in your additional percentages for each video sale. Much easier accounting and reporting.

3- Settling on price and services up front makes the deal crystal clear to everyone involved. Without a clear price and service definition up front, there is no basis for handling production plan changes once the project has started.
Say you start out saying "Yes" to 5% based on what you hope sales might be like as well as how this all fits in with your other commitments.
Then, mid way through the project, there's an idea that could be "fantastic", but maybe doubles your work or time constrainst conflict with another project you're working on.
Is even doubling your percentage of unknown sales really compensate for all the extra work??

How will you feel about your friend after doing all this work and then sales don't go well at first and maybe he/she simply desides to stop trying to sell it ???

In my case, I set the price up front.
To help out my friend, I did a lot of extra things that normally would have cost a lot more (storyboards and "pitch" presentation to help him sell the idea to investors, greenscreen compositing shots, a series of "bullet time" shots, CGI animation and managed the outsourcing of DVD Authoring and duplication (5000 discs) at no additional charge.)

I got paid, I'm happy.
He got his DVD's, loves the results, he's happy.
We're still friends and continue to work on several other projects all the time.

Hope this helps.
Good luck with the project.
Have fun!

Dylan and Nick,

Have you guys done any other martial arts stuff with video, other than instructional? Just curious.

Thanks for the info. I will be going with your guys responses. Since I will be giving the client full rights what would the wording say in the contract? Also can I still show the video as my demo since I will be giving full rights away?

I guess a few things...

I also did some personal work for some one that was testing for instructor's certification within a multi-state karate school system.
Prior to qualifying for an on-site test at the org's HQ, she had to submit tape of herself executing and teaching various techniques and such.
Pretty dry stuff. Probably not too different from shooting a deposition except there's a bit more action. :)

I've shot a few kickboxing tournaments in Atlantic City, NJ and NY, NY.
A few times for the promoter, and once at the request of a school that was sending up several students to compete. I think the school just wanted have a descent video to review and "learn from" after the event.

One other thing that might not even count was just something that I did for a group of friends. There were six of us that earned our black belts in the same year. As a thank you present to our instructor, we got all the video we could find of all the demos, and tournaments and special events etc. that we had from the years and years we had been training together. I edited that with video from the black belt tests and set it to the Creed song "Higher".

Have fun.

From my experience, having spent years training in the martial arts (not anymore), having worked with many martial art teachers, and well, just lots of experience in genreal, I have a fairly negative impression of martial artists who want to be involved in video or movies. To sum it up, all talk, no action. I'm talking instructors here, not students. I've only met two martial artists that ever really stepped up to the plate when it came to producing. The rest are all full of great ideas and intentions, then never follow through, or get distracted and move on.

My top jaded story: Last year I agreed to co-produce a video on spec, for a martial artist, about stretching and workout excercises. I was going to handle the production, and he was going to work on getting sponsors to help pay for post production costs, and distribution costs (like duplication, advertising, etc...) We shot it, I cut it, gave him promotional copies to shop around for sponsorship, and he did sweet F.A. I think he showed it to one potential sponsor, then decided he wanted to become a pro golfer and didn't want to teach martial arts full time anymore. Since I had paid my own expenses, I was out $2500 (travel, lodging, food, rental expenses, not including 10 days of shooting, and 15 of editing, that I could have been working on something else). Could I sue him for not fulfilling his part of the deal? Maybe, but I doubt he has the money to pay me, and if I lost, the laywer fees would be brutal. I can offer a few other stories of martial arts teachers doing stuff like that, but that is far and above the worst. I dunno what it is. Maybe they think "I can be a movie star" and then the reality sets in that it isn't that easy. Like I said, I'm pretty jaded.
On the other hand, the ones that stepped up for me did a great job. I guess it is hit and miss like normal people. Anyway, hope you learned something from my lesson. Get paid up front like Nick, who is much wiser than I am. That's one lesson my sensei didn't teach me. :)

As far as video martial arts work: A private black belt grading, a fairly large martial arts tournament, the above project, some action clips. Nothing awsome.

Michael, I've shot at least 50 martial arts instructional videos. I would suggest charging for making it, with 1 or 2 masters, and not taking a cut for each video sold.I shot bouts at the odd full contact tournament with 16mm.