A brief introduction to clarify the background of my question.
I'm 70 y.o., retired electronics technician. In my 20's I took some non-academic courses (movie history, editing and script writing), worked as assistant director in a feature, assistant cinematographer and cinematographer in few documentaries.
Few months ago I encountered an amazing true story about seemingly impossible coincidences. The story, or actually few similar stories told by the same person (retired military and police general), dictate making a documentary out of them. I have a personal emotional motivation to make this movie, since it indicates that 'there may something up there, beyond blind coincidences'.
So I embarked on producing and directing it. So far there was one shooting day, to which I hired a professional cinematographer and audio man and rented two Canon C300 cameras with the list of accompanying gear as listed by the two pros. Basically it was a reunion (after 41 years) of the 3 main persons involved in the main chain of events.
Visually, what I have, as a strict documentary, is 'talking heads' and some stills. Visually it is very poor for my aim to make a really appealing movie. So, from the onset of the idea about the movie, I knew it should be a docu-drama, when some events are enacted by actors.
The one day shooting done so far isn't enough, even not for a strict documentary, let alone docu-drama. So I'm preparing a kind of trailer and a rough cut of the main events, to present to potential sponsors. There are few such bodies in my country, sponsoring and giving partial finances to documentaries.
Alas, some of the potential sponsors require presenting a budget, along with the appeal for sponsoring. There is no way I can make a budget, I can do almost everything else on my own, but not a budget. For this I need an experienced producer. Before approaching potential producers, my concerns at this stage are maintaining the rights for the movie, legal and artistic.
From the info I gathered so far, the accepted state of affairs is that the producer holds the rights of the film, while he can hire and fire everyone else, including the director. I'm not willing to give that power over this particular movie to anyone else.
What to do? Remain the producer and hire executive producer? Hire a producer and have a legal contract with him that I'm the sole owner of rights of the movie? Any other suggested solution?
I'm 70 y.o., retired electronics technician. In my 20's I took some non-academic courses (movie history, editing and script writing), worked as assistant director in a feature, assistant cinematographer and cinematographer in few documentaries.
Few months ago I encountered an amazing true story about seemingly impossible coincidences. The story, or actually few similar stories told by the same person (retired military and police general), dictate making a documentary out of them. I have a personal emotional motivation to make this movie, since it indicates that 'there may something up there, beyond blind coincidences'.
So I embarked on producing and directing it. So far there was one shooting day, to which I hired a professional cinematographer and audio man and rented two Canon C300 cameras with the list of accompanying gear as listed by the two pros. Basically it was a reunion (after 41 years) of the 3 main persons involved in the main chain of events.
Visually, what I have, as a strict documentary, is 'talking heads' and some stills. Visually it is very poor for my aim to make a really appealing movie. So, from the onset of the idea about the movie, I knew it should be a docu-drama, when some events are enacted by actors.
The one day shooting done so far isn't enough, even not for a strict documentary, let alone docu-drama. So I'm preparing a kind of trailer and a rough cut of the main events, to present to potential sponsors. There are few such bodies in my country, sponsoring and giving partial finances to documentaries.
Alas, some of the potential sponsors require presenting a budget, along with the appeal for sponsoring. There is no way I can make a budget, I can do almost everything else on my own, but not a budget. For this I need an experienced producer. Before approaching potential producers, my concerns at this stage are maintaining the rights for the movie, legal and artistic.
From the info I gathered so far, the accepted state of affairs is that the producer holds the rights of the film, while he can hire and fire everyone else, including the director. I'm not willing to give that power over this particular movie to anyone else.
What to do? Remain the producer and hire executive producer? Hire a producer and have a legal contract with him that I'm the sole owner of rights of the movie? Any other suggested solution?
