4.1 Health and safety practice

Health and safety is important when working on film productions as the Producer has a responsibility of ensuring crew and contributors as well as the public remain safe in the working environment when films are being made due to possible hazards identified in risk assessments. The risk assessment is a legal requirement identifying and minimising risks as well as including liability and insurance.

Allergies and emergency contacts also need to be identified before production to maintain health and safety. The producer is responsible for managing the set and enforcing the risk assessment plus checking risks that may not have been anticipated during production in addition to a briefing on set at the start of the day.

During our production, we maintained good health and safely by managing the kit during location change. We had good prior knowledge of the kit, knowing how to handle it, ensured kit was not left unattended, kept kit dry when outside and kept wires tidy on set to minimise tripping. Before shooting, we also obtained permissions for our different locations such as the Watershed Cinema and Bristol Old Vic and completed contributor release forms.

4.2 Explain why copyright is important in the film industry

Copyright:  The exclusive and assignable legal right, given to the originator for a fixed number of years, to print, publish, perform,                          film, or record literary, artistic, or musical material.

IP: Intellectual property is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect.

The main reason why copyright laws exist is to protect original creators work from being replicated by others. This means original ideas cannot be copied and therefore left unoriginal with pointless investment. Work that has a copyright often requires payment for usage therefore copywrite law retains profits to the original creator. If copyrighted material were to be used in our film, it would heavily restrict where the film could be posted online as the original creator may sue. Platforms such as YouTube automatically block content using copyrighted material.

To ensure our film does not infringe copyright and other IP law, we are using visuals which we have created ourselves in addition to a soundtrack mixed by us. If needed, we could have also claimed fair usage under educational circumstances as we are creating a documentary. However, this was not required for our production. Copyright law has loosely affected our film production as it means we have to record our own sound for effects and make our own soundtrack.