How much trouble if Guerilla footage ever seen?

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davidnssbm

Active member
Let's say you wanted to shoot a shot real quick of say, a state capitol building without a permit because it's too expensive. How much trouble can you get in if the footage is seen by someone of authority? Also, what if the shot was for a freelance gig for a video for someone's website?

Thanks
 
Wait, you can get in trouble for simply having a shot of a state capital building? Are you sure about that? That seems ridiculous.
 
The practical answer is: don't worry about it. The exterior of a building is almost always a non-issue; it's the effort of getting the shot that causes the complications (filming on streets, tripods on public sidewalks, becoming a hazard or a nuisance, etc).

There are a few buildings that you are not legally entitled to show without permission, because the very appearance of them has been protected by trademark. Those would include (IIRC) the Chrysler building and the Empire State building, as well as the Hollywood sign.

For anything else, the prevailing idea AIUI is: if you can see it from a public street, you can film it and show it.

As always, I'm not a lawyer, nor do I even pretend to be one, so take it for what it's worth.
 
The whole point of guerrilla shooting is to show what you recorded later. Otherwise you're taking some personal tourist snapshots, which no one cares about.
 
Generally public buildings are considered owned by the people and as such images are free to use. However, as Barry said if you are on their property obtaining the images permits and insurance will be required. Just shoot from the street and everything should be good.
 
Disney tried to file a cease and desist on footage of their concert hall in downtown L.A. when it appeared in some unreleased footage. As long as you are not FEATURING the exterior, like Barry and phudsontx said, you shouldn't worry about it. Disney lost the suit - the ruling was that when you build in a public area, then they can't control general public eyelines. Of course, that's different if you are inside their property (say at Disneyland). But with exteriors, Disney has to chill out and has to be a little less anal.
 
I can't see public entities, like a state government, coming after anybody over images of their buildings in low budget films. A lot of states are competing for film production to come to their states, and going after a low budget filmmaker for showing state buildings in a film could turn into a PR nightmare for them. Now, this is not to say that at sometime a government bureaucrat might try to mess with you about it, and if that happens I've leaned, in a different context, that the way to fight the government bureaucrats is to sick the ELECTED officials on them, at the highest level possible. High level elected officials trump low level bureaucrats almost all the time. So, don't sweat it.
 
But what if a permit was like $1,500 dollars to get a shot of the state capitol building from right in front of it and NOT across the street off campus?
 
davidnssbm said:
But what if a permit was like $1,500 dollars to get a shot of the state capitol building from right in front of it and NOT across the street off campus?
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Did you even read the above comments. It doesn't matter AFTER you've shot the footage. The issue is, "will you get in trouble trying to film it?"

Shoot from across the street then. Or do it from inside your car driving away lol
 
In school a few peers of mine decided to sneak into a train yard to get a shot of a specific building. A couple of months went by and they thought everything was fine until the school was approached by the train people because they had managed to track down my peers (they had been caught on a security cam). As you can imagine, the train yard got mad at the the school and my peers and there was a lot of talk of confiscating the footage that they shot whilst on private property. In the end it worked out okay and they got to keep it. In the unlikely event that my peers had not been caught on camera and the train people somehow went to a screening of their film, I imagine a situation similar to the one described above could happen (but who knows for sure)

Like everyone is saying though, if it's public you're probably okay. If it's private, you might be okay and you might not. And like Z Block said above me, the private entity would have to have a lot of time on their hands to want to give trouble to a small production for retrospective trespassing. But than again, my peers got slammed because, apparently, the train company did have that kind of time. If you use common sense, chances are you'll be fine.
 
hehe

hehe

Stealing locations isn't fun or ideal, but it has to be done sometimes. We just did it a few times on the last feature, 2 out of 3 times we got shut down ultimately, one time we got our shots anyway and stalled long enough to make it work. The other time we got some but not enough coverage to be totally satisfied so we tried again on private property with permission. It was kind of lame, though, we were permitted but LA County Parks and Recreation is different than on LA County sidewalks, etc.

Our permit didn't really cover everything we would be doing. Filming in a mall parking lot was hilarious, though, because the security took so long to figure out we had no right being there that we had an hour to film first and when they were ultimately like yeah ok you're not supposed to be here we just said thanks and we're done bye bye now. It was stressful and awkward though, I would have preferred everything be used with permission but ah well.

Filming in front of a police station / federal building was the highlight of the stolen locations, though, Sunday late afternoon / evening during magic hour, even had to cheat the actors into the street and stop traffic without a permit or any sort of permission for about a minute or so both directions (only maybe 3 cars either way) and then we wrapped for the day and got the shots. It was pretty remarkable. A great story that's for sure.
 
John M said:
In school a few peers of mine decided to sneak into a train yard to get a shot of a specific building. A couple of months went by and they thought everything was fine until the school was approached by the train people because they had managed to track down my peers (they had been caught on a security cam). As you can imagine, the train yard got mad at the the school and my peers and there was a lot of talk of confiscating the footage that they shot whilst on private property. In the end it worked out okay and they got to keep it. In the unlikely event that my peers had not been caught on camera and the train people somehow went to a screening of their film, I imagine a situation similar to the one described above could happen (but who knows for sure)

Like everyone is saying though, if it's public you're probably okay. If it's private, you might be okay and you might not. And like Z Block said above me, the private entity would have to have a lot of time on their hands to want to give trouble to a small production for retrospective trespassing. But than again, my peers got slammed because, apparently, the train company did have that kind of time. If you use common sense, chances are you'll be fine.
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But then again, they only got caught while they were filming, technically. Had the security cam not been there, I think they'd be in the clear.
 
We typically ask and most times are allowed. The only time we've had an issue is at the Wrigley Building and even they gave us total free reign of the back. The guard was like, "You can't film in front of the building, but you can do whatever you want in the back" which is where the big statue is and all the tourist go. We used this location in both of our films. The police station in "Wages of Sin" had a similar take which was we could shoot anything we wanted as long as was outside. So I set the camera up on the street and shot myself walking out of the police station and waving. The next cut is CiCi (our leading lady) waving back and me crossing the street to meet her. If you know Chicago, you know there's a Mickey Dees across from the station. BUT you probably don't know where every police station is and you probably won't question it. (Unless you just have a thing for police stations). The footage of here was taken in Downtown Chicago, the police station footage was taken on the Southside.

-Nate
 
Hey,

In the sub-$1 million range. I'm sure if we had more money we would have never had to do that, and I really don't like it personally. I'm kind of a nervous personality in that respect, I am a straight arrow kind of guy, like I went through high school as the only person in my 242 person class without a single detention in 4 years. So... I'm used to playing it by the book!

We are still in post-production (with a few pickup shots to get), but our UPM is a DGA Unit Production Manager and trust me we know exactly what has to be delivered to distributors. This is the 9th film these producers have done together (budgets $250,000 through $10 million), and they've each done well more than that before they started their business together. Distributors don't care about permits, but they do care about signage, products shown in the movie, artwork on the walls, photo / video / audio releases, SAG / DGA / union contracts fulfilled, and a huge load of other paperwork. The amount of paperwork generated on even a small film like ours is astonishing to me. We had a product placement coordinator, though, so that means we got free product or at least clearance from probably about 100+ companies in all, everything from Apple, Microsoft, and Volvo to Coca Cola, Budweiser, Heineken, Corona, and Vitamin Water. And literally everything in between from cereals and snack foods to shoes and clothing to bags (Jansport) and cell phones (Boost Mobile), etc. That is a huge advantage because not only does it save us money on having to buy craft services and rent props, but it also means no worries about clearances on any of that stuff. It was all cleared through the product placement companies.

We'll be arranging distribution later this year. But yeah, I'm not the expert on all of the deliverables, but I certainly have a pretty good knowledge of it. For instance, we have hundreds of still photos of products placed in scenes or on set that we had to deliver to these product placement companies to show them that we fulfilled our end of the deal. Any locations that we shot in and used their logos, we have location release forms for those places, etc.

Besides trying to do absolutely everything right, you also end up buying E&O (errors & omissions) insurance before the distributor picks up the rights to your film. I like the analogy that E&O is like malpractice insurance for filmmakers.
 
One thing to consider. If sneaking onto private property to film, what happens if one of your cast or crew gets hurt? Who's going to pay for it? Not the property owner, that's for sure. And your production's liability insurance might not either, since you didn't have permission to be on the site. That leaves just YOU to cover the medical expenses. Depending how seriously hurt the person is, that could run into a lot of money.

Just something to think about.
 
Jonathan, thanks for the detailed reply. It was very informative!

Drew, that book looks great. I think I'll pick up a copy and read it cover to cover.

Thanks again to you both!
 
davidnssbm said:
But what if a permit was like $1,500 dollars to get a shot of the state capitol building from right in front of it and NOT across the street off campus?
Click to expand...
1) What can you get from "right in front of it" that you can't get from across the street? (Probably better)
2) A state building is owned by the PUBLIC.
3) A bureaucrat demanding payment for taking pictures of a public building on public property will have something to answer for when hauled up before his superiors.
4) It is our DUTY as citizens to keep the government in check. They work for US. Bureaucrats constantly seek to expand their authority and must be constrained to their proper place.
 
Public buildings should be no problem ("public domain" / built with public funds).

Private buildings as mentioned could be problematic, but only if they care and if they ever find out. Two ifs.

EDIT:

And then there's if the future distributor of your film and/or insurance people want location releases -- 3 ifs.
 
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