Aachen1983 said:
Hey, Last Laugh! Love the site. I should have been more clear. When I said contract, it was supposed to mean that should they back out, they no longer hold rights to ANYTHING having to do with the company. Say, she had done previous work for you, then if she backs out without prior notice (say, 2 weeks like a job), then she loses all rights and privelages on the products, including the ones she was in. There is no free-agency in this man! Another would be if she was on salary, then she would not be paid if she was due without the above stated prior notice. I didn't mean to make it sound like hold her ass aggainst her will. Sorry.
I'm still not entirely sure I understand how this works. In my case, both parties sign the contract at the beginning of a shoot, and it only covers the material filmed during that shoot. Unless she decides to leave in the middle of the shoot (in which case she simply wouldn't get paid), there's really no way she can break the contract. She can back out before a shoot, but in that case the contract hasn't been signed yet, since nothing has been done.
If she poses for a shoot but later doesn't want to do another (assuming I'm interested in doing one), well, she's not under contract, so that's her right. There's also no reason why she can't keep the salary she got for the first shoot, since she did it. None of the footage I shoot belongs to her anyway, so she doesn't lose anything by not doing a second shoot. And since most of my models only pose once, it's often a moot point. My models aren't like on a list of "part-time employees". Our business relationship is a one-shot thing, or possibly 2 or 3 one-shot things. It's not continuous.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding again, but you seem to say that in your case a job is something that lasts over several days, which is a new concept to me. There's nothing in the contract I use that says a model has to do anything more than pose for the shoot that we do the day we sign it. She doesn't have any obligations after that.
Of course, the contract does imply that the footage is mine, and legally speaking the model has no right to it and can't change her mind in the future and ask me not to use the material after all. But that's not really what "backing out" means to me. To me it means that a model claims to be interested but later decides she doesn't want to do a shoot after all. It's unfortunate, and frustrating, but technically speaking the model doesn't really owe me anything, so she can do what she wants.
See, the way I interpreted your previous post, I thought you meant that once you got in contact with a supposedly interested model and made plans with her to do a shoot sometime in the future, you had her sign a contract that says she has to do the shoot and that she can't back out of the project. It didn't sound like a very appealing contract to me, you see (for the model, I mean).
In any case, it seems we work in very different ways when it comes to dealing with the models. I hire and pay my models by the job (that is, by the video), while you seem to have a more continuous business relationship with yours, involving obligations on their part. Fine by me, we each have our methods. But this is probably why I didn't understand what you were saying in your previous post, because I assumed most producers worked more or less the same way I do.
