Visual Demons

Well my faith in the Justice system is still in tact after my recent hearing at Milton Keynes Court with Visual Demons Ltd. The Judge found in favour of us, the defendant’s after hearing all the evidence and denied Visual Demons the chance to rip us off for £2,500!!

Furthermore, Gary Spriggs of Visual Demons had to pay all our travel expenses incurred to defend ourselves and all the court fees.

After this experience I would highly recommend demanding a terms and conditions from any company such as Visual Demons and  to have it looked over by a solicitor before signing. Although we didn’t even see a terms and conditions, this also meant we didn’t sign any either which thankfully kept us in the clear.

Last year we hired Visual Demons to do some product demonstration videos after seeing them at the Ecommerce Expo in London. After an intial chat with Gary Spriggs, the companies owner I decided to give their services a try and so gave them an order of 5 videos with a view to testing the increase in conversion they might create on our Website and then ordering more if they increase sales.

We sent our products to them and then awaited the videos. A few weeks after our order we received some of them through and unfortunately they had a black line above and below the picture, consequently reducing the size of the video.

Also the videos from Visual Demons came with music which we did not request and text (again not requested) at various points throughout the video stating things that were untrue about the product!

We requested changes and in the end opted to take care of both the audio narration and the final editing and production of the video ourselves!

One video did not demonstrate the product as we requested and so we emailed to ask for it to be amended and received no reply whatsoever………….. then came the REAL SHOCKER. Having very little time to chase Visual Demons as it was our busiest period (January) we awaited patiently for our corrected video but nothing happened. The next thing we see is a COUNTY COURT JUDGEMENT come through the post for both the initial agreed amount AND an additional £2,500 for using the videos on our Website - despite having agreement from Gary Spriggs himself!

Unbelievably we had received NO OVERDUE INVOICE letter, NO PHONE CALL from their accounts department AND NO EMAIL! We immediately telephoned Visual Demons only to find a very different Gary Spriggs, defiant, rude, aggressive and threatening to “wind down our company” if we did not pay!!!

He claimed to have sent emails asking for payment BUT WE RECEIVED NONE. What company ever sends payment reminders by email and if they don’t get a response CLAIMS A JUDGEMENT?!

As I spoke to Gary Spriggs I realised very quickly that in fact he was utilising the law to extract an additional £2,500 from us! He had claimed we had used his copyrighted videos without permission and had not responded to his request for payment (by email).

Our advise based on our extensive experience in the Web Industry is avoid using Visual Demons at all costs. There are many other quality Web Video companies out there such as Shoot You, WibVideo and MediaMaker are all UK based companies that offer a high quality service.