By now you should have had your idea, done your research, thought about the structure of your piece and done a treatment. You will have recce’d your locations and spoken to any contributors. You should now be ready to plan your actual recording.
The shooting or recording schedule, sometimes called a running order, is a detailed plan for the day. By now you may be a little impatient about the number of documents you are being asked to prepare. You are keen and eager, and ready to get going, and the thought of another document is making you irritated. It’s understandable but in the professional world this is how it is done. Recording days are the most expensive part of a production and for that reason everything is prepared in order to get the best out of the time; you very rarely get a second chance. If you aren’t clear about what you are trying to do you will waste time and in the end have less material to edit. Your production will suffer.
Your research and your treatment should mean that you now have a good idea of how many locations you will need to visit and where they are. The most important document you are going to need to prepare before the shoot is the shooting schedule or recording schedule, sometimes referred to as a call sheet.
This document is designed so that everyone involved in the production knows where they are supposed to be, when they are supposed to be there, what they need to bring and any safety advice (see below). Depending upon what kind of recording it is, factual, news, drama, music video, you will need to include different things.
Here are three templates for a recording/shooting schedule suitable for a factual recording: a blank one and two worked examples. If you log onto the website you will be able to print off some blank copies.
Template 9.1 Factual schedule
NB: You may have only one location or you may have many. You need to plan out the time for each location.
Template 9.2 Recording schedule
Timetable
Template 9.3 TV shooting schedule
Timetable
Drama shoots tend to be more complicated than factual shoots, since they generally involve more people. They therefore tend to have very detailed and more specialised shooting schedules. This is dealt with in more depth in Chapter 16, ‘Shooting dramatsed sequences’. However, your scene breakdown will form the basis of a shooting schedule.
Template 9.4 Shooting schedules for drama: Jake’s Letter
A second important task for the actual shoot day is a risk assessment. Safety is critical on any location recording everyone has a responsibility for safety.
In a professional world producers and directors are expected to manage safety on any shoot or recording, and most organisations will set out guidelines and often require staff to attend safety workshops or training. If you are working on an exam piece you are in a slightly different situation. Your school or college will have its own safety procedures. You would be expected to work within those procedures first. You should be aware of any safety requirements laid down by your college and adhere to them. This section looks at how safety would be managed on a professional shoot, but you should always refer in the first instance to your own organisation.
Everyone on the team needs to be aware of safety; however, in a professional world one person will be designated as having overall responsibility for managing safety. They have to take this responsibility very seriously. If there is some kind of accident and the person responsible is shown not to have managed events adequately then they could be held personally responsible; having said that, other people on the production team could also be held personally responsible if they behave in an unsafe way.
In professional location recordings there will be a section in the shooting schedule which deals with safety. This is usually called a risk assessment. These are fairly common documents used in many industries for different purposes.
A frequent response to being asked to do a risk assessment is that it is awkward, time consuming and unnecessary, and there is often an assumption that someone is going to try to stop you doing the things you want to do. But this should not necessarily be the case.
Risk assessment is not a list of things you are not allowed to do.
Risk assessment is:
Good risk assessment can increase the amount you are able to do on location rather than restrict it. The fact that there might be some risk doesn’t automatically mean that you shouldn’t do it, but it does mean that you have to understand the risk and take adequate precautions. The point of filling in a risk assessment form is not to create pointless paperwork but so that the person responsible for safety takes the time to think through what they are doing and what the potential problems might be. You also need to keep things under review as things change.
OK, so what’s involved? Producers and directors looking at safety for the first time often go to one of two extremes: they either see nothing at all to worry about and the risk assessment boils down to I’ll be really careful, honestly I will. Or they go the other way and start to see danger in the most benign of locations, creating a whole series of inventive catastrophe fantasies. Neither approach is very helpful.
To understand risk assessment you need to understand two key phrases:
Risk assessment is about to asking yourself three questions:
What is the risk?
Who is at risk?
How do I minimise the risk?
You need to decide what measures you can put in place to keep people safe. You also need to make sure that these measures are implemented on location.
Before we go into the specifics, there are four general rules which will significantly contribute to the overall safety of the recording.
On a professional shoot it’s usually the director/producer who does the risk assessment for a shoot or recording. If there is a particularly complicated shoot, aspects of safety will be delegated to professionals or experts; events like underwater filming or helicopter shoots, or anything of this nature would be managed by experts.
Remember: when you are out and about everyone is responsible for safety. You should all have safety in mind when you in a location.
Are there any hazards in the environment? You may have chosen a location where there are very obvious hazards, if you are on a building site, for example, but here are some rather more common things to think about:
After each of these questions you should then try to think about:
It is impossible to list all the combinations of things that you might be intending to do; however, the table opposite shows some of the most common situations you might come across.
These are just a very few examples of the kinds of things you need to think about. It’s not possible to cover all the possible things you may come across but just remember three simple questions:
Here is a very simplified risk assessment form – you need to think about this for each of the locations you intend to visit. If you log onto the website you will be able to download this form. The following is a completed risk assessment for the production we’ve just scheduled.
Template 9.5 Blank risk assessment
Template 9.6 Festival Fever risk assessment
Each year, thousands and thousands of tents are abandoned at festivals across the country as festival-goers, weary from the exertions of the parties, find the effort of packing up tents too much to handle. The piece reports on the environmental damage caused by the vast amounts of debris left by festival-goers and the attempts of one company to make a difference. Karen Ellis reports from the Elusive Festival in Oxfordshire.
Description of activities:
NB: You will notice that in this risk assessment the safety briefing at the second location will be conducted by the site managers. In this situation you as the production team won’t be able to properly assess the risk as you don’t know enough about it: you wouldn’t be expected to know exactly what goes on in a factory and what is and isn’t dangerous. However, you can make sure that someone is there to advise who does understand the risks and can tell you what precautions to take.
Having read the above, you may be going one of two ways. You may by now have decided that this advice is hopelessly over-protective and that a little rain never hurt anyone, and be impatient to move on. Or you may now be deep in some fantasy which ends up with the entire crew at A & E and have decided that the only safe thing to do is to stay in the school hall.
Whichever way you incline towards, just try to keep to the middle ground. A short period realistically assessing any risk and taking small, easy precautions can save you an enormous amount of time and possibly problems in the long run. That said, assessing risk can sometimes be difficult and need expert advice. If you feel unsure about something and don’t know how to assess the risk adequately then you should seek help.
Even on the best planned shoots ACCIDENTS CAN AND DO HAPPEN. In these cases the priority is to take care of the injured person and then to let the right people know what has happened.
REMEMBER: Although this is a description of how safety is approached on a professional shoot you will need to make sure you refer to your own organisation first for safety advice.
