Risk assessment - Miss Georgiou

Risk assessment

A risk assessment is looking over what we are going to need to do in order to film our opening sequence and then identifying whether there is anything within the production that may cause harm to members of the group and how to prevent that from happening. When we are filming, we must always be aware of the potential risks that our production has. In our group we discussed and then made a list of the biggest risks that we felt our production had, and then continued our discussion on ways in which we could prevent them from happening.

 

The risks that we came up with were:

Two of the biggest risks our group identified involved the iconography in our sequence. For starters, we planned for the antagonist to kill his mother using a knife, which is dangerous due to the possibility that someone may get cut. The actors will have to stand close to and hold the knife in order to make the sequence look more realistic and shocking. A way for our group to prevent anything from happening, we will make sure that there is always a space between the actors and the sharp end of the knife. Also, by filming the shot from different angles we can decide during the editing stage which piece of footage looks more realistic and flows best with the rest of the sequence. The second piece of iconography that is a risk for our group during the filming process is the rope. This will appear in the suicide scene at the very beginning of the sequence when the antagonist ties it around his neck in the build up to his death. The rope could potentially be too tight around his neck which would result in the actor feeling uncomfortable or lacking breath. In order to prevent this from happening we will need to make sure that the rope is only loosely tied around his neck, but that the camera is positioned in a way that makes it appear tighter. Also, we will make sure that the chair he is standing on is stable, therefore reducing his chances of falling off. When it came to filming, we agreed that instead of using an actual rope, we would use a black scarf that looks similar to a rope but is much more comfortable.

We realised that another potential risk in our production are the props and objects in the frames that the actors or people behind the camera could potentially fall over or that could get in the way of the camera. A way to prevent this from happening would be to make sure there is always a space for the actors and cameraman to move around, and that the only objects in the frame are ones that we plan on using.

When we are filming our final frames we will need to stand near the road side which means that there will be cars around us. There are obvious risks of being around cars, so in order to prevent anything dangerous from happening we will need to make sure that we are more aware of our surroundings at all times, especially when we are trying to focus on the filming. On the other hand, we could try to film at times or in areas where there will be less cars on the road. We made a late decision to film on a quiet road near the school that both people and cars rarely came down. This meant that there were little disruptions for our group and therefore we could get the filming done quicker.

There were some risks in our production that our group faced while we were filming that we had not predicted we would encounter. For example, on our final day of filming outside, the weather was really bad which meant we had to be careful not to damage the camera or the tripod in the rain. We managed to cover the equipment by using our umbrellas but it was still difficult to keep the equipment stable.