Health and Safety

Health and safety is often an area that is misunderstood in terms of its importance, when considering video and film production. When producing media forms, there are a lot of external factors that need to be considered to providing a safe and risk free set for actors and directors to film in, a technique that works to eliminate risk and promote safety is a risk assesment. The risk assesment is a way of highlighting potential risks in the form of a document and discussing ways in which it can be eliminated contributing to a smooth as possible production experience. We had experiences involving risk assesment forms and had our own risk assessment form when on location (a template of which is on the right). We considered filming in wet weather as being a risk to both the camera becoming broken and potential slipping and injury of actors, as we are deciding to film both on clifftops and the underpass, we need to ensure the weather is suitable before embarking on filming. Additionally every time we booked a camera from the college we were required to fill out a risk assessment form which was covered by the college insurance policy and also helped us to identify any risks to ourselves, general public and production equipment. This means us having to evaluate access requirements and permission to film, which in our case is not such a defining factor as we are using public locations and will ensure no external member of the public is featured in our video.

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Additionally, contributing to the health and safety is carrying a call sheet at all times when on location, a call sheet is a list of everyone working on the film with a reference to one of more contact details such as mobile phone number or email address. This enables you to be able to contact all relevant personell, including actors, equipment suppliers, crew and anyone involved in transport and logistics. it is a vital piece of equipment across all stages of the production. Below is the call sheet use between me and my partner, we had all the contact details of our college tutors and technicians and had this on us at all times. I also had Craig the technicians number in my phone when on location in-case there was technical difficulty with the cameras. We didn't have much difficulty in producing the call sheet as we don't have any actors in our video, due to it being shot from first person.