I was recently doing a bit of filming for a friend, and now a big production company has seen my footage and wants to use it. The footage contains good content leading up to other stuff they filmed later, but the quality is not so good. They are probably the biggest production company in Australia as they make a large number of very successful tv programmes.

They have looked at my footage and want to use about 1 minute in the final 1 hour slot. The program is part of a very successful series and the next series will air on the lifestyle cable channel.

They were hoping I'd just be happy with a credit, but as they will make a fair whack out of this, its not for charity or education, so I think I should be entitled to a reasonable fee.

I'm tired of being the nice guy and getting shafted for it!

Does anyone have any ideas on what I should be charging.....I was thinking around $30 per second, but if anyone has some experience in this area I would love to hear from you.

cheers

Greg

I'd bear in mind that lifestyle cable channels aren't the largest budget productions around and the fee you've mentioned may be higher than they're getting per minute to make the programme. I'd try a third of that figure and see if they bite, it wouldn't be an unfair amount for a day's filming on a broadcast production with a 1/3" camera. Just ensure that they're not taking all the rights to the footage.

Certainly back in the old days of stock photography, the business model was based on it being cheaper to licence the use of the stock pic than to get your own commercial photographer to go out and shoot it.

My guesstimate on this one would be to charge them about half of what it would cost them to go and do it themselves. That way it will be a business no-brainer for them and a commercial bonus for you.

Andrew

FWIW, I used to pay $100 a rough minute to get news footage from the local broadcaster for a not-for-broadcast license, plus duplication costs (tape plus labour). This was about 10 years ago BUT it was material sourced on BetacamSP.

If your footage is RARE, value goes up as it would either be cost prohibitive or impossible for someone else to go shoot it, as Andrew states.