I am working on a video project (for work) but which will ultimately sit on youtube or similar for clients to see.

At the design/thinking stage right now. Anyway, I watched a video recently and really loved it, it was stylish, succinct and basically was just what I’d want.

If I were to develop my own version of the theme so that it was similar but in no way identical,created my own words and images etc etc so it was obviously not directly lifted from the original, but if you looked at the two side by side, you could tell one was influenced by the other, could that potentially be a copyright infringement?

Where do you draw the line between gaining inspiration from a piece of work and falling foul of copyright laws?

Don’t use any stars and you’ll be fine.

At the design/thinking stage right now.

Not wishing to sound insulting, but it doesn’t sound like theres an awful lot of design or thinking going on there. It would appear to amount to ‘hey thats cool! I’m going to copy that!’

It won’t be breach of copyright, but if anyone who’d seen the original then sees yours , they’ll just think that you’ve ripped off someone else work. And that doesn’t tend to impress many people. Its a pretty limiting approach

Be more creative. Sit down and think what it is you’re trying to communicate, and scribble some of your own ideas down. It’ll end up being a far more productive process than simply mechanically going through the motions of copying what someone else has done already. You might find that if you take that approach, then it could eveolve into something completely different, and more fitting. And something you can feel a bit of pride in, and ownership of. You’re not going to get that from just copying someone else stuff

Edit: Just read that back. Sorry if that all came across as a bit blunt slowjo. It wasn’t meant too. But as a designer, thats what I’d do. I’ve had clients come to me and say “hey, I’ve seen this, can we do something like that?’. I always talk them out of it, as its never a good way to go about things, with that as a start point

@binners, fair comment.

No offence taken. The difficult bit was working out how to get quite a complex message across in about a minute – which I have done.

The visual side just seemed to ‘fit’.

I’ll give it some more thought. I have worked out my own animations etc and thinking about it, I could build on that to develop something that is ‘mine’.

If you are looking at something you like then look at why it works for them. Unless they are in exactly the same market making exactly the same product for the same customers then a copy of that won’t work for you. If you are in the same market then a copy fails to differentiate you from your competition.

Copying the style, rather than the content won’t (necessarily) infringe copyright, but it does make your video look like a pastiche of the original, and pastiches tend to be comical, even if they’re not intended to be.

You need to look at the steps taken the make that film something you like rather than look at the end result