Re: Fired! Client wants ALL project related material

"Forget it , Jake, It's Chinatown..."

Even if this was a work for hire, there's no way they can claim legal rights to your original paid-for Jump-Backs.

Ditto the other comments on not giving them the stock footage or music,or plug-ins, they can buy that themselves. YOU did.

Personally I wouldn't even give them the project files, but only their original footage and a window dub of your version of the master,which is enough of a guide for your replacement to see where things were going, but not something they could rip off and use without paying you for it. If you take the view that the master is what they paid for and not just your time, then I guess you give them a master... but I would fight that, myself.

I had one of these happen once where the sessions all seemed to go fine, then the client turned around immediately and took the finished product to another place to re-edit it, saying something disparaging about it. I met that re-editor socially some time later, he seemed really apologetic and embarrased about it, kept telling me all he did was shave a frame off here and there, but he had kept about 98 percent of my edits the same, he thought my work was fine going in. The worst part was he felt bad he was ordered to take my name off the credits entirely. I said it didn't make any difference to me, as I'd been paid.


Sometimes, clients don't feel they've put enough of their own decisions into something, haven't "put their own stink on it", as we sometimes say around the office. It's an ego thing. If you get one of these, sometimes they feel satisfied if you deliberately botch some simple thing like the end point of a dissolve and they can "catch" the mistake and correct you. Suddenly they feel more in control and more part of the process. The things we do to make clients happy!

I'll tell you I think that you did one thing perfectly right: asking for extra money on the first one where you had to establish all the looks and the graphic templates, etc. That was very smart, and reasonable, if they were going to be re-used a lot in subsequent shows. That extra work on the first one makes the subsequent ones go much faster, saving them money.