From: DOMINIC ANGERAME (email suppressed)
Date: Mon Jun 15 2009 - 11:21:26 PDT
Hi Scott...Sandy Daley who had her film Robert Having His Nipple Pierced had that same experience many years ago with Du Art, she had to pay some outrageous price for storage....it may be the NYC thing....2square ft of rental costs a lot...I guess....
Dominic Angerame
--- On Fri, 6/12/09, Scott Stark <email suppressed> wrote:
From: Scott Stark <email suppressed>
Subject: DuArt Lab storage fees
To: email suppressed
Date: Friday, June 12, 2009, 7:19 AM
Hi all, I thought I'd report a troubling situation with DuArt Lab in New York in case any other filmmakers are in the same situation.
In 1998 I used DuArt to transfer my film Noema from Hi-8 video to 16mm negative film, and had them print several release prints. DuArt kept all of the film elements and returned the tape to me; I haven't thought about it much since, except once a couple of years later when I had another release print made.
Last month I asked them to return the film elements to me. I was notified that I first had to pay a "storage surcharge" of $40 per month for the last ten and a half years (125 months), amounting to $5000 plus tax.
This was obviously a quite a shock to me, first of all since other labs I've used (such as Monaco) never charged me a dime for storage. Alpha Cine charges a modest $1.25 per month. But more importantly, never once in the last 10+ years did DuArt send me any kind of invoice for these charges. If they had, I'd have paid it off immediately and withdrawn the elements. Yes I see now it's in their literature and I should have read more carefully at the time (though I never actually saw their literature, since the transaction was handled via phone and U.S. mail at the time). But I wish they had billed me 10 years ago instead of letting the charges accrue to thousands of dollars.
In the meantime, filmmakers beware: if your elements are being stored by a lab, look carefully at the storage agreement.
Scott Stark
www.scottstark.com
www.hi-beam.net
__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.
__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.