surrey blog post, heath and saftey & continuity by Emmanuel Akunor

My role as part of the snipez team was health and safety and continuity. The continuity meant that I was in charge of continuous flow within the filming process and making sure everything was in check. And the health and safety meant that I was also had to make sure that the locations were secure and safe to shoot In. during filming there were a number of problems that occurred. One of them was that the weather didn’t stay consistent which affected the continuity of the project, as a result of this there may be different contrasts in each exterior shot during the film. Another thing that could affect the continuity would be difference in the characters appearance i.e slight change in clothing or slight disturbances such as the microphone clashing with the subject. In terms of the health and safety aspect of the production, because the weather wasn’t at its best we had to make sure that none of the equipment was affected by the rain or any other potential hazards to the other equipment that we used. Once the rain had settled we had to make sure that none of the equipment was left in any potentially dangerous places such as the camera being left in rain puddles or any damp areas. For example in the scene where the main character (snipez) is walking while making a phone call to his friend greezy, some of the equipment used could be left on the side which means that it has become a vulnerability to being lost or stolen while filming. Another problem that was taken into consideration was permission to film in certain locations; this was very much the case when shooting the establishing shot for some scenes. The reason for this was because some locals i.e shop owners may not have been happy with their shops being shown in the film, so to resolve the situation this meant that we had to explain what was going on to the shop owners before filming. This was also the situation with the chip shop scene where we had to ask permission from the person who owns the shop before filming and also making sure we were punctual with the timing when arriving. The problems we could have faced while filming this scene would be continuous interruption from people within the shop or the environment being too noisy which may have affected the continuity. Although, we managed to tie sounds in to add some realism to the scene. During filming the scene that had the biggest effect in terms of health and safety was the final scene which was when snipes is confronted by the gang at the end because of the heavy rain on the day of filming. Due to the heavy rain this meant that there was a high chance of the equipment being damaged which would have a bad effect on the project as a whole. As a result of this potential issue it meant that we had to film quickly. Overall I think that we worked well as a team and managed to finish production on schedule and it showed well we can work together to produce the best quality of work.