Frame & Field Studios Business Plan — Organisation, Rights and Compliance

The team structure, image rights and licensing terms, model and property releases, and the POPIA obligations a studio carries.

Organisation, Rights and Compliance

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  • 6.1 The team
  • 6.2 Rights, licensing and personal information

6.1 The team

Role

Number

Monthly cost each

Note

Managing director and creative lead

1

R62 000

Creative direction and the largest client relationships

Senior photographers

3

R46 000

Photographers

4

R31 000

Business development

1

R38 000

Retainer and framework agreements, not one-off briefs

Producer and client services

1

R34 000

Owns the diary; the role that delivers the utilisation assumption

Retouchers and editors

4

R27 500

The capacity constraint identified in Section 4

Studio manager and equipment

1

R24 000

Finance and administration

1

R22 000

Total permanent staff

16

R552 000

Base payroll R6 624 000 a year

Plus statutory contributions

2.1%

UIF, SDL and COIDA; total payroll R6 763 104

Payroll of R6 763 104 is 69.2 per cent of the cash fixed cost base. Seasonal and freelance crew — second shooters, assistants and outsourced retouchers — are costed per shooting day in the direct column rather than carried as overhead, which is what allows the studio to flex between a quiet January and a busy October.

6.2 Rights, licensing and personal information

Requirement

What it covers

Type

Company and tax registration

CIPC registration, income tax, VAT and PAYE

Gating

Copyright and licensing terms

Copyright Act; ownership of images and scope of client licence must be contracted

Gating

POPIA compliance

Protection of Personal Information Act; images of identifiable people are personal information

Gating

Model and property releases

Written releases for identifiable people and private property used commercially

Gating

Professional indemnity and public liability

Cover for delivery failure, data loss and on-location incidents

Gating

Drone operations

Remotely piloted aircraft licence and operating certificate where aerial work is undertaken

Gating

Generated imagery governance

Ownership, training-data provenance and indemnity where AI assets are supplied

Ongoing

Advertising disclosure

Emerging disclosure requirements for generated imagery in advertising

Ongoing

Archive and retention policy

Documented retention, access control and deletion of image archives

Ongoing

Labour compliance

BCEA, national minimum wage, UIF and COIDA; freelance crew contracted correctly

Ongoing

Equipment insurance

High-value portable equipment on location and in transit

Ongoing

Client contracting

Scope, deliverables, usage period and territory specified in writing on every engagement

Ongoing

Two of these carry more weight than their position in the table suggests. Copyright and licensing terms determine what the studio actually sells: an image licensed for twelve months in South Africa is a different product from one assigned outright worldwide, and studios that fail to contract the distinction give away the second while charging for the first. And POPIA treats images of identifiable people as personal information, which makes an unmanaged image archive a compliance exposure rather than an asset.