First, thank you for helping. That clears up a lot of confusion. The director’s friend (a lawyer) is also attempting to help us out but we figured we need a more solid confirmation.
Second, this next part is about to get real ugly, but bare with me:
You’re right - all of this is an absolute mess. Let me start from the beginning and maybe I can work out some alternatives - if that’s even possible at this point. Worst case scenario is scrapping the entire project and restarting.
We started in 2019 with a volunteer-based film. No one getting paid. We made a simple 9 minute short that’s being edited by me (since we had zero budget) and it was all just-for-fun.
A couple of months ago, we decide to take it a step further. We thought maybe we could make a full-length film and pay people. We came up with all sorts of ideas for funding. Yes, we weren’t really thinking legal terms - bad start.
People applied, and we reviewed applications. We’re ready to go. Only issue is payment.
That’s where we’re at. We’re considering repeating what we did with the previous project at this point, but it’s all very complicated.