Production Agreement
Commissions a production, and settles who owns the result.
A contract between a business and a production company or freelance creator that covers scope, budget, ownership of the final work, usage rights, and credit. It's what turns a verbal understanding about a video, photoshoot, or campaign asset into an enforceable deliverable with clear ownership.
- Business days
- 1–5Business days
- Lawyer reviewed
- 100%Lawyer reviewed
- Surprise bills
- $0Surprise bills
What a Production Agreement should include
Scope of production — what is being made, in what format, and to what specification.
Schedule and delivery — milestones, delivery formats, and what acceptance means.
Ownership — who owns the finished work and the underlying materials.
Clearances — who is responsible for music, footage, locations and appearance releases.
Credits — who is credited and how.
Fees — the budget, payment schedule, and how overages are handled.
When you need one
When you commission video, audio or photographic work you intend to use commercially. Clearance allocation is the clause worth reading twice: whoever carries it is responsible for every third-party right embedded in the finished piece.
How Ruby drafts it
Tell us what you need
Describe the agreement, your business context, and how fast you need it. A few smart questions, not a legal questionnaire. Your price and turnaround are confirmed before anything starts.
Ruby drafts it
Once pricing is confirmed a qualified Ruby lawyer is assigned to your file, and the first draft is built from your answers and real Canadian statute.
A licensed lawyer reviews every line
A lawyer licensed in Canada reviews and finalizes the document before it reaches you, and writes the plain-language summary that comes with it.
Signed, stored, and yours to revisit
You get the final agreement and its summary, stored so you can come back to it rather than hunting through email for the current version.
The fee is set before any of that starts. Hourly billing moves as scope does; a flat fee is one number, confirmed in writing, that doesn’t change after the work is done. See how Ruby prices agreements.
Or did you mean one of these?
These get confused with a Production Agreement often enough to be worth ruling out before you buy the wrong document.
Questions people ask
Only what the agreement says. Paying for a production does not automatically give you ownership of it, and production companies frequently retain rights by default. If you need to own it, the document has to assign it.
Whichever party the agreement makes responsible — and this should be explicit. A production delivered with uncleared elements is a problem for whoever publishes it.
For commercial use, generally yes. Appearance releases are usually the producer's responsibility to collect, and their absence surfaces at the point you want to use the footage somewhere new.
Looking for the plain definition rather than the document? See Production Agreement in the Ruby legal glossary.
This page is general information about Canadian business law and is not legal advice. Laws differ by province and change over time, and how they apply depends on your circumstances. For advice on your situation, speak with a lawyer licensed in your province.
Need a Production Agreement?
Ruby drafts it for a flat $799 CAD, confirmed before any work begins, with a licensed Canadian lawyer on every document.