Location agreements, permits and certificates of insurance

Three documents, three authorities

A location agreement is a private contract: the owner grants access, the production agrees to terms — fees, hours, use of the property, restoration, liability. A permit is a public authorization: the film office or jurisdiction allows the activity to occur, with conditions — posted hours, parking, police or fire presence. The certificate of insurance is proof to both that the production can pay for what goes wrong.

The trap is that these are often confused as one step. They have different owners, different lead times and different failure modes — an owner can agree and the city still refuse; a permit can issue and the rental house still hold the gear until the COI arrives.

What a location agreement settles

Beyond access and fee, a workable location agreement settles the operational details: what parts of the property may be used and for what, the hours of use including early load-ins and late wraps, what the production may alter and must restore, who is responsible for damage and how it's assessed, and the specific practicalities — power, water, parking, neighbors, noise — that determine whether the location actually functions on the day.

It also settles cancellation and weather terms, which is the clause a producer reads again when the forecast turns. Verbal understandings with a friendly owner are the classic production failure: everyone was happy until the crew scuffed the floors and nobody had agreed who pays.

• •Agreement: private terms with the owner — access, hours, fees, restoration, damage.
• •Permit: public authorization with conditions — hours, parking, safety presence.
• •COI: proof of coverage, with the requiring parties named on the policy.

The additional-insured requirement

Practically every counterparty in a production requires being named as an additional insured on the production's liability policy — the location owner, the permit office, the rental house, sometimes the client and the union signatory body. It's a standard requirement with jurisdiction-specific minimum limits and precise wording, and permits are routinely not released until the certificates are on file.

The mechanics are unglamorous and unforgiving: the broker issues a certificate per requiring party with the required limits and wording; the film office or owner verifies it; the shoot proceeds. Productions discover the requirement late when the permit office or the location pushes back — and pushback on shoot week is the expensive way to learn it.

Permits scale with the activity

Permit requirements grow with what the production intends to do: standard filming hours are one thing, street closures and traffic control another, drones and pyrotechnics add their own approvals and coverage levels, and each jurisdiction sets its own deadlines for application. The permit plan is really the shoot plan read by the city — and a shot list that quietly grew a drone shot has a permit consequence.

Permits also carry enforcement risk that lands mid-shoot: filming outside posted hours or closed streets is a stop-work conversation, and the fix is rarely fast. The production's schedule and its permit file have to agree, which is a data problem as much as a paperwork one.

How Clarice handles this

Clarice tracks locations as records with their agreements, status, requirements and scouting data, and keeps the production's document library — signed agreements, permits, certificates — attached to the location and project it belongs to, with e-signature for the private documents.

The location checklist surface tracks what's on file versus outstanding per location, so 'can we shoot here' is a status, not a search through inboxes — and the day's schedule draws from locations that are papered, permitted and insured, not merely scouted.