Alister Chapman, a fellow filmmaker and undoubtedly the expert when it comes to Sony cameras, posted a comment on his Facebook page in the wake of last week’s tragic accident in which cinematographer Halyna Hutchins lost her life. Alister has given us permission to publish his thoughts here on CineD. Scared more about our jobs than our safety. The tragic film set shooting event in the US seems to highlight a much bigger issue amongst freelance film and video workers. There are now many people commenting that the accident in the US was an accident looking for a place to happen. That many of the crew had previously experienced unsafe practices from particular people on set. What concerns me is reading comments such as “we’ve seen this person working un-safely before and complained, but nothing was done”. Working together When you work together as a crew or team on any job safety is the collective responsibility of everyone. While an individual may be designated to be in charge of a certain safety aspect, surely it remains the responsibility of everyone to raise any safety issues they become aware of and then if those issues are not immediately dealt with satisfactorily any further work should stop. Photo by Lê Minh from Pexels But this doesn’t appear to be happening. Instead workers are scared to speak up and even more afraid of actually refusing to continue to work in case they may lose their job. Freelance crew have very little job security,...
Published By: CineD - Tuesday, 26 October, 2021