Camera share agreement

Couldn't you just be extremely general? Keep it plain english and straight to the point?

Agree on anything you want in there. Sounds really simple. I honestly doubt it'd actually stand in any legal court though... so....yea. Unless you could put the camera under an LLC controlled by the both of you.

what about when one of you moves to another area of the world? surely you won't pay for postage every time you want to use the camera? i would be careful co-purchasing something expensive because you never know when you and your friend might have a falling out. It's possible you'll never see the camera again if they run off with it and there are no legal actions you can take to get it back.

I've never done it myself, but a couple of acquaintances have, and the general consensus is it works until it doesn't.

It's easy at first to organise when each person will be using it, but unless the two of you will work on the exact same shoots all the time for as long as you want to keep the camera, you'll run into trouble at some point.

Two acquaintances of mine bought a RED Epic together, and they were happy for a while until one decided to buy the other half off the other guy, because it just wasn't really working.

To play devil's advocate somewhat: You and Salacious perform slightly different crew roles, right? You're a director who will sometimes shoot, whilst he's, first and foremost, a DoP (correct if I'm wrong). And you work on a lot of projects together?

I can't see why this wouldn't work if it was closely managed. We're presumably talking about a $2k-$6k investment on each of your parts, which probably constitutes the equivalent of about a month of camera rental. So long as you can make your agreement work for a year or so, it should be good value. And if, later on, one of you wants to buy out the other half of the camera, I think that would be a fairly satisfactory conclusion.

NickClapper said:

To play devil's advocate somewhat: You and Salacious perform slightly different crew roles, right? You're a director who will sometimes shoot, whilst he's, first and foremost, a DoP (correct if I'm wrong). And you work on a lot of projects together?

I can't see why this wouldn't work if it was closely managed. We're presumably talking about a $2k-$6k investment on each of your parts, which probably constitutes the equivalent of about a month of camera rental. So long as you can make your agreement work for a year or so, it should be good value. And if, later on, one of you wants to buy out the other half of the camera, I think that would be a fairly satisfactory conclusion.

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Er, yes. That's spookily close to the truth - exactly what we do.

And even when we shoot, we're completely different. For example, I'm useful with a steadicam and very smooth and 'classical' in style. 8Salacious9 likes to push everything to the max, go crazy and we learn from each other. All our kit is completely different but complimentary. For example, he has a fig rig, I have a steadicam, our lenses are all different etc...

The only nuance is we already have loads of kit and a camera or 2 but this time we want to share a GH4. He's a Canon guy, I'm a Sony guy but we have both ended up going crazy over the 4k, image quality etc... We were originally tilting for a C100 with Atmos but we were so impressed with the little Panasonic that we had to get it.

Funnily enough, we also end up agreeing on visuals. We both know what we want and we end up in that place where together we know what we want to do.

I also think he'll end up as a pro and he's already getting paid to do stuff. Once his reel gets to the right place and he gets a decent agent, he'll be off to do some great stuff.

But in-between, we need to do some stuff and most importantly, do stuff we both love.

WhiteOpus said:

what about when one of you moves to another area of the world? surely you won't pay for postage every time you want to use the camera? i would be careful co-purchasing something expensive because you never know when you and your friend might have a falling out. It's possible you'll never see the camera again if they run off with it and there are no legal actions you can take to get it back.

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Easy, include a clause that if one party opts to relocated further than a set distance, they either have to buy out the other half of the camera, or forfeit their share reverting sole ownership to the other party.