Film Production - Risk Assessment

Before filming, we produced a risk assessment for all of the shots we wanted and decided whether they were safe enough to film. If we found there was any form of risk, we found a way to reduce this risk before we went ahead with it.

• Muddy hill - could slip and fall. We will go when it's less muddy or find a different route to the filming location.
• Working on rough terrain - could trip. Make the actress look for a safe route to walk on before we start filming and clear a path beforehand.
• Hair pulling scene. Make Matthew only pull her hair lightly and make them practice this plenty of times before filming. Lucy will have to over-exaggerate how badly her hair is being pulled for effect. We also need to make Lucy put her hair into a ponytail (partly for realism as muggers will target women with their hair up because it's easy to grab) so that her hair will be pulled less.
• Covering Eva's mouth. To avoid this we will make Matthew not actually put his hand over Eva's mouth and instead just put his hand in front of her face - which we will frame to make it look real.
• Twigs. We might need some noises of twigs snapping so we will have to break some to record the noise. Make sure nobody is too close because some of the twig might break off and potentially hit someone. There's also the risk of someone tripping over a twig as the area we are in has a lot of trees - like how we are going to avoid having Shauna fall over, we will walk to the filming locations slowly and look for safe routes to where we want.
• High angled shots. As the tripod only allows us to film at eye-level, we will have to place the camera on other surfaces to make the shots higher. We will need to ensure that the camera is safely on the surface and that it's stable. We also need to hold the camera ourselves - make sure everyone filming has the wrist strap on so that we don't drop the camera. Don't let anyone climb on anything to get a high-angled shot.
• Fire/candles. We will have to be careful when lighting the candles as somebody could get burnt. We also need to ensure that the camera doesn't get too near to the flame as it will get damaged. We will also put the candle on a stable table with nothing else on it so there's no risk of anything else being damaged or the candle being knocked off.
• Rain. Makes the floor slippy. Like when on muddy surfaces, we could slip while filming and injure ourselves, which could also damage the equipment.
• Filming in the dark. This would make us unable to see what's on the ground and we could trip on something. We will take torches with us so that we can light up the area beforehand to check for risks.
• Lucy being dead. The nettles could sting Lucy while she's lying in the bushes so we'll make sure most of her skin is covered to lower this risk. There also could be sharp things hidden in the leaves so we'll check the entire area before filming.
• Swings/park equipment. One of our shots will be very close to the swings and the camera could be knocked over. We will find out where is the furthest they can reach on the swings and then put the camera just out of reach.