Practical Skills - Health and safety, when on set.

Health and Safety

Professional film crews take health and safety issues very seriously. The line of responsibility runs from the Producer to the Production Manager and 1st Assistant Director and finally on to all crew members who have a duty of care which is recognised by law. If someone can see the potential for an accident and does nothing to try to prevent it, they can be held responsible in some way, probably along with their senior colleagues.


When filming, people have many things on their minds, things can get rushed, and risks can increase. Even simple things can become dangerous because this is not an ordinary situation. Of course, all of life presents hazards, but if someone is asked to run down a hill repeatedly to get the scene right, for example, the risk of them tripping and falling on their face is increased with each time they do this. If the hill is pavement rather than grass the risk of serious injury is increased.

Risk assessment

The way to stay safe is to look at each shooting set up or location individually and think of what exactly could go wrong. This is called a risk assessment.

It's a three step process

• Identify all the hazards 
• Evaluate the risks 
• Identify measures to control the risks 

Then put in place safeguards to eliminate or minimise risk. You should make a record of any risk assessment to ensure the students are clear on how to stay safe. This can save time during your shoot. Rules about listening to each other, respecting a chain of command, looking after equipment properly, and not rushing, will all help to keep people safe and happy.


'Hazard' refers to the potential for harm. while 'Risk' is the chance of that harm actually happening. Though some hazards might seem very obvious, people might still need to have them pointed out.

Weather

Extremes of weather are one commonly overlooked hazard. If you are filming outside all day, it is essential to make sure the crew are dressed appropriately. A lot of the time you may be standing around and people will get cold very quickly even in what seems quite mild weather. Layers of clothes are best, and get everyone to bring a waterproof and a woolly hat - they keep out wind as well as rain and are invaluable.

Sunburn and heatstroke are other outdoor hazards. Always have high protection sunscreen on hand and make the students put it on. Try to get students to wear some kind of sun hat or stay in the shade when possible and make sure lots of water is available to drink. The other reason for sunscreen is to stop the actors' appearance changing drastically and messing up the continuity of the film!

Time pressure

Rushing to finish in time is when hazards get missed, or people start taking risks. If this starts to happen, take a moment to calm everyone down and remind them: this is only a film. If you feel really pressured try to think of how to lighten the work-load: can you cut out some shots or set ups to give you the time to get the most essential stuff for the film without a panic? Or can you come back tomorrow to finish?

Other common hazards

Tripping hazards

Move or gaffa tape down cables and objects that could be tripped over.

Lifting hazards

Go carefully when moving or lifting heavy or dangerous things, ask someone to help you.

Camera risks

When a camera operator or cast member is walking during a shot, make sure they are comfortable with their route and there is nothing that could cause problems (a camera operator who needs to walk backwards for a shot should have an assistant to guide them and/or check their route).

Water

Shots that involve water.

Precarious

Shots from high up or near the edge of something.

Shots that look illegal

Shots might look illegal if you didn't know a camera was there. This could cause distress to members of the public &/or cause a police call out.



Bibliography -

Moving image education, Health and Safety. Available at: https://movingimageeducation.org/create-films/production/the-production-department/health-and-safety (accessed 31st October 2019)

Images -

Safety first - available at: https://www.direct365.co.uk/blog/health-and-safety-signs/ (accessed 31st October 2019)

Time - Available at: https://nationalpost.com/entertainment/books/how-the-world-became-obsessed-with-time-and-efficiency (accessed 31st October 2019)

Weather - available at: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/long-range-weather-forecast-uk (accessed 31st October 2019)

4 hour film challenge - unusual perspective

We were tasked with making a short film exploring a different perspective of what would normally be seen, in knowing this I based my film around a persons day to day life of going and sitting at a bench,  when shooting this I decided to follow the protagonist throughout the film using different angles and distances that could be considered unique for this sort of movement, such as extremely long shots from a weird angle or close up shots of the protagonists feet while walking. In editing this short film I learned how to create "bins" in premiere pro and learnt the importance of renaming and organising clips as it makes the editing process a lot simpler, especially if you are coming back and continuing with the edit at a later date, helping you know what shots are what and whether the clip is particularly useful or not.

4 hour film challenge 1920's

Contextual Studies - American new wave short film task

Brief - 

I am tasked with investigating a New Wave of my choice from a recognised era,  critically assessing the key factors surrounding a range of films and assessing the impact of their reception, alongside that I am tasked with creating a short film that is around 2 minuets long, demonstrating the techniques of the new wave I have been assessing, I have chosen American New Wave as my area of study for this assignment.

Planning - 

• Car scene, 
• Pub scene.      all of theses because of ease of accesses the weekend I will be filming will be at 
• Skating.          the last 2 locations and a friend has agreed to use his car.

• Long shots and jump cuts prominent in filming, due to the use of them in new wave film.
• Lack of script due to the objection of the conventions of classical cinema

Techniques of new wave

focus on crime and drugs
real conversations non scripted
jump cuts
punchy dialogue
mistakes
long takes
inspiration - the godfather and pulp fiction
In particular the car scenes

Narrative

my narrative changed over time, originally I was going to do a short clip about 2 guys buying drugs from a crime lord, however now realising the complications of such, with a limited time to film, I changed my idea to a simple 2 minute video of my weekend, done In the style of American New Wave Film.

Test Footage - 

This is some of the test footage I took, using a tripod and camera and adapting the iso settings to get some footage that looks natural, the dialogue in the videos is non scripted and is natural conversation between the subjects of the film,  the shots are a mix of mid and long shots focusing on a subject, and they are all long takes, in editing I will add them together including jump cuts and non diegetic sound in some places to add to the stylism of American New Wave.

Bibliography:

Pulp Fiction scene. Available at: https://youtu.be/LBBni_-tMNs (accessed 7 NOVEMBER 2019)

4 hour film challange - editing found footage

given the brief of using found footage to crete a short video editing to a given song, the song that was given was about you by xxyyxx. i found it hard to create a narrative using found footage, if i was to this differently next time i would choose a different song that would allow for a narrative, however creatively speaking using the editing skills from other tasks it was easy to edit to the music and the effect given was a creative effect and the feedback given from my peers was that it was .....

4 hour film challange - illusions

Given the brief of using jump cuts to create illusions, we chose to edit to a soundtrack of the popular Wii theme tune as it was easy to define the beats in which to do the cuts to, creating the illusion of people appearing and disappearing to the tune. For this we had a camera setup in the corner of the room facing to the other corner so the front of the room wasn't in shot allowing for a free space to use for holding props and keeping the actors out of shot, as well as making it safer to shoot stopping people from tripping over the tripod legs. the only health and safety risk we came across was when stacking things on tables like rolling chairs etc, but that was overcome by making sure we marked out where we were putting things. I feel like I could improve the video by adding more jump cuts to the beat when there are longer durations between cuts to stop the video from looking weird, however after getting feedback from the clip I was told that it made audience members laugh, showing that I got engagement from the audience and when doing a group critical analysis of the clip we agreed it was creative, we had Thought of sound first for ease of editing we used a tripod to make sure the camera didn’t move so we had a stable image however it was slightly out of focus, wasn’t the best footage, due to the exporting process so maybe we needed to use a different clip type.

Contextual studies - Easy rider analysis

Easy Rider is a record of a certain time in American history, and a chronicle of a culture clash that never quite ended. But it’s no mere historical document or cinematic curiosity. It’s a freewheeling take on freedom—what it means and what it costs.


Billy and Wyatt—who goes by the nickname Captain America, and has the star-spangled accessories to earn it—cross the United States in two senses of the word: in traveling from Mexico to Los Angeles, through the Southwest, and on to New Orleans, and in giving offense. They disrupt, oppose, betray. Like so many of the fringe characters the duo meet on their journey, Billy and Wyatt don’t have regular jobs, families, or homes. They live from one drug deal to the next, go where they please, and stick around until they feel like moving on again. This isn’t a philosophical statement on their part; it’s just how they happen to live—and Billy’s initial puzzlement at George’s analysis suggests that he’s never thought of himself as a symbol of anything. But the representatives of America’s dominant culture—the go-along-to-get-along proletariat that then president Richard M. Nixon would describe as the Silent Majority—have been thinking in those terms, and as far as they’re concerned, these moon-child freaks are walking provocations. Billy’s and Wyatt’s appearances challenge prevailing notions of manhood (the bikers are routinely harassed for their long hair and eccentric clothes, and mocked as girls or queers). The born-wild bikers’ nomadic existence proves it’s possible to survive without becoming tranquilized zoo animals.The word freedom also describes the mind-set that created Easy Rider. The film was shot totally outside of studio channels, for around $350,000, and was cowritten by Hopper, Fonda, and novelist and screenwriter Terry Southern (Dr. Strangelove, Candy), all representing facets of the counter­culture—a multigenerational catchall term that covered so-called Beats, or beatniks, in the fifties and early sixties and hippies in the late sixties and early seventies. They were united by their embrace of a bohemian lifestyle and their dissatisfaction with postwar America. Fonda came up with the germ of an idea for a modern western keyed to that sensibility and brought in Hopper and Southern as collaborators. Southern, who had been traveling in hipster artist circles since the late 1940s (his friends amounted to a who’s who of midcentury arts and letters—Nelson Algren, Kenneth Tynan, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Henry Green), was the most aesthetically grounded of the trio, and he took the first pass at the script in 1967. (And despite later revisions and on-set improvisations—and Hopper’s attempts to diminish his role—Southern’s influence on the final film can be strongly felt. Visual flights of fancy notwithstanding, Easy Rider is a spare, poetic work, marked by a mix of spiky humor and tenderness that’s characteristic of Southern.) Hopper treated Easy Rider as a laboratory in which to test his theories of what constituted truly adventurous writing, directing, and acting. And he drove himself and his castmates to give intuitive, risky, confessional performances. (For the New Orleans sequence with Karen Black and Toni Basil, Hopper persuaded Fonda to talk to a statue of a woman in a cemetery as if it were his mother. “Oh God, how l loved you,” Wyatt sobs.) Hopper’s background as a photographer and art director informed the movie’s loose, inventive visuals. He encouraged his cinematographer, László Kovács—a survivor of the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, who adored the American landscape—to shoot most of the film’s exteriors with natural light. (Kovács’s highly expressive on-the-fly photography is a tour de force in the possibilities of the zoom lens, and an incalculable number of subsequent movies have tried to ape Easy Rider’s visuals.) Most daringly, Hopper eschewed straightforward plotting and instead devoted long stretches of the film’s running time to footage of the guys riding their bikes, while cities and towns and mountains and trees roll past them in a continuous geographic slipstream. He told his crew that he wanted the film to be a mind-blowing visceral experience, like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which came out a few weeks before Easy Rider began production. Easy Rider also transcends its cultural moment, because it’s about more than bikers and hippies or the tension between libertines and reactionaries. It’s about the difficulty of escaping social conditioning and economic imperatives and sustaining a truly free life. In the oft-cited campfire scene near the end, Wyatt tells Billy, “We blew it.” That line has been taken as an indictment of the American counterculture, which, like so many protean revolutionary movements, started self-destructing once it gained enough power and prominence to effect real change. One can read it that way. But the line strikes me also as a more personal sort of confession, an admission that they have ultimately succumbed and bought into their own outlaw version of the capitalist rat race—the idea that a man is not a true success unless he has accumulated enough money to stop working and take it easy.