Hi Bob,
The key to what you are asking is substantiality. If you do not not copy a substantial amount of a copyright work then that does not infringe that copyright. Incidently this is not an example of fair dealing (fair use is the American term for what is a wider category of things which may lawfully be done with copyright works). Unfortunately for you we in the UK don't have a parody category of fair dealing, which I think would probably have met your needs.
So taking the elements you wish to include: you want to use the whole image of the dog, so that amounts to substantial, however long the image is up on the screen. The chiming of the watch from
A Few Dollars More is just a few seconds from a movie that lasts 132 minutes so that is not substantial. Furthermore the watch scene is just one of many in the movie that cannot be said to encapsulate the essence of the movie, so you are on safe ground with that.
The Shaft sample is more borderline. Even some relatively short sequences of music which have been sampled by mixers have been found to infringe in the past if the bit taken forms a key element of the original song. I assume that you chose that particular piece
because it makes the audience think of Shaft, so that tends to support the idea that the bit could be a substantial part on qualitative grounds, rather than quantative ones. Furthermore the copyright owners of this recording (
Sounthbound Records Inc) are more likely to object because generally the music industry are hot on copyright infringement, so this becomes more difficult to call. You mentioned the idea of getting another musician to record his own version for you. This has its own pitfalls as, if the segment is long enough to be considered substantial, the musician would need the permission of the composer and lyric writer* (assuming any words are included) to perform the song, so really you are in much the same position. If you were in the business of mixing music or making mashups etc then it would be worth getting a special licence to do this from PRSfor Music but that would not be economic for what you propose.
Returning to the dog picture. As I said, on the grounds of substantial copying you should seek permission, but you are unable to find who to seek permission from. Indeed you might even find that this is something which has been deliberately put in the public domain by the owner, but how can you tell? If you have image editing software such as Photoshop or Picasa look and see if there is any embedded data in the image. You need to look in the image data under Exif or IPTC. Assuming that reveals nothing, my suggestion would be to return to the website where you found the picture via Google picture search and see if the owner of that site bought a licence to use it. Chances are they didn't and they will be of no help. The next thing is to check the
main picture libraries such as
Getty,
Alamy,
iStock,
Shutterstock etc by searching on the key words "dog, bone" (
here's an example) and see if any of them license its use on behalf of the copyright owner. Although time-consuming, this is the most likely route to finding the rightful owner, and ironically if the image is one of theirs, they are the people who will come after you if you use it without permission! In the case of the microstock sites, a royalty free licence is likely to be very reasonable. Getty on the other hand can charge hundreds of dollars for a licence.
As you are finding, making a video can have as sorts of implications for copyright clearance you never dreamed of. But unlike hundreds of thousands of others who do this and post the results on Youtube without getting clearances, you are clearly going about this the right way and with a little care you should be OK. That way, if you do make something from the venture, you can be confident of keeping the proceeds. Good luck with the project.
* According to the site
www.songfacts.com the owner of the copyright in the lyrics is the Universal Music Publiching Group, so it is possible that the original author Isaac Hayes has signed over his right in the song in exchange for an upfront payment and royalties.
