Write a risk assessment

What this is about

The useful version is short, specific to this shoot, and results in a concrete change: a different rigging point, a spotter on the road, an earlier wrap. In Germany employers owe a documented assessment of workplace hazards, and a film set is a workplace; location owners, broadcasters and insurers routinely ask to see one before they hand over keys or countersign. The real value sits upstream of all that paperwork, though. Writing the document forces a walk through the whole day, hazard by hazard, at the one moment when the plan can still change for free.

The order matters more than the tools. Skip a step and you usually notice two steps later — by which point the fix costs several times as much.

What runs differently here

In planning terms, that means:

• The assessment covers this shoot, not filming in general. A template with no location details is paperwork, not protection.
• Every hazard needs three lines: who is exposed, what could realistically happen, and what you change to prevent it.
• Measures rank in a fixed order: remove the hazard, engineer around it, organise around it, and only then hand out protective equipment.
• Working hours are a safety topic. Fatigue and the drive home after a long day cause more incidents on small shoots than rigging does.

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Walk the shooting day in your head, location by location: arrival, load-in, rigging, shooting, moves, wrap, drive home. Hazards live in the transitions more than in the takes.
2. Write down the concrete hazards you find — cables across a public path, work at height, hot fixtures near fabric, traffic, water, crowds, lone working, long hours.
3. Name who is exposed to each one: crew, cast, visiting clients, members of the public, the location's own staff. Different groups need different measures.
4. Pick a control for every hazard and prefer removing it. A lower camera angle beats a ladder; a closed corridor beats a warning sign taped to the floor.
5. Give each measure an owner and a time — who tapes the cables, who briefs the driver, who checks the rig before the first take of the day.
6. Write it in a form people will read: one page, plain language, hazards in the order they occur during the day rather than sorted by category.
7. Brief the crew out loud at the start of the day, not by email. Two minutes on hazards, exits, first aid and who to call is the part that actually works.
8. Revise the document whenever the plan changes. A new location or an added stunt turns yesterday's assessment into a description of a different shoot.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Downloading a generic template, changing the title and filing it — the location changes, the hazards change, the document does not.
• Listing measures without an owner, so the cable ramp stays in the van all day.
• Treating cast and visiting clients as if they knew set behaviour; they are the people most likely to walk into a stand.

With TillyGen

TillyGen's location and schedule data gives the assessment its spine: which setup happens where, at which hour, with which gear — so hazards are read off the plan instead of recalled.

Change one constraint and the consequences travel through the whole plan: affected shots are flagged, the call sheet is regenerated, and nobody keeps working from yesterday's version.