Yup. I agree with everything you just said, Neverman.
I haven’t been stiffed for years because, among other things, I just do freelance work on the side when I’m interested — mostly for longtime and carefully screened new clients. The places where I’ve worked, however, haven’t had quite that same rate of success since they can’t afford to be quite so picky.
Just another thought on established companies… Typically, unless established companies are having financial problems, they always pay their bills — partly because the accounts payable people at the company aren’t spending their own money. For them, it’s just their job to collect the invoices, write out the checks and keep track of how much is spent.
Like you mentioned, it’s dealing with individuals where the payment is made from a personally owned bank account where collection problems typically arise.
In the future, if you have a client that doesn’t feel comfortable paying everything up front, write a contract that allows them to back out.
So lets say that you shoot the film and they decide they’re not happy with the direction. That would be a time for them to cancel the contract. They would then receive whatever portions of the money was not spent. This way, you don’t have to stress over your production budget or if shooting gets a little out-of-hand.
You will, however, need to decide who owns the raw footage if they do walk away.
If a customer walks because they don’t like the work and they don’t pay at all, they loose all claims to any of your work. <-- period. End of story.
Partial payment by contract only provides that you are paid for work done, your expenses, and other lost work you can prove you’d have done if you’d not taken the job in question. Then you still need to prove that he/she was acting in bad faith.
The only way to negotiate out of a contract is by mutual consent. Then you’d have the chance to crunch numbers.
