 As good as your screenplay is or your viral video or your blog, I've got something to tell you. It is not worth dying for. I would even go as far to say as it's not worth getting injured for. So today, we're going to look at the three most dangerous things on a film set. When you talk about safety, a lot of people think, well, that's not going to happen to me. But every single year, dozens of people get injured and some people actually get killed making movies. Accidents happen. I say accidents, but a lot of the time it's avoidable negligence. That's the cause of these kind of things. So today, we're going to break down how these injuries happen and how you can avoid them. An injury doesn't just derail your shoot, it can endanger your entire career. Insurance is expensive, but it is also a nightmare to make a claim and get paid from. And then afterwards, it's very hard to get insured again. We need insurance because filmmaking engenders are a wonderful kind of optimism. We all believe that we can do amazing things and sometimes we can. The positive aspect of that is that we attempt the impossible and achieve it. The downside of that is we take risks we should never have taken and sometimes that catches up with us. There is a deep culture of risk taking in filmmaking, but it's up to you as the filmmaker to make sure that those risks are creative and not physical. If you're the producer or director on set, it's really up to you to set the example that safety comes first. You have to act in a safe way, you have to make sure that the people working for you and working with you are safe and that they don't take risks that they shouldn't be. I'm going to sound like a total downer in this video and trying to shatter your dreams of going out there to the desert and letting off explosives, but this comes from personal experience. On one of my first music video shoots, we were using weapons and I got shot in the face with a shotgun shell. It was a blank, but had the armor not insisted that everyone wore safety goggles, I would probably be blind. The actor pulled the trigger, the safety was on, nothing happened. We cut, she pulled the trigger again with the safety off and it went right into my face. I had burn marks through my cheeks that didn't heal for weeks and if it had gone in my eyes, I would have been blind. Now that was over 10 years ago and I've tried to make sure since that no one ever gets injured on one of my sets again. So let's take a look at where the dangers lie and how you can avoid them. The first big danger on a film set is weight. People don't understand that when you have something heavy and you put it up high, if it falls, it can kill somebody. The most common culprit for this is sea stands. People don't understand that when you put something up high, if someone to turn the sea stand knuckle the wrong way, or to improperly load the arm of a sea stand, that it can come crashing down very fast. And if a 35 pound sky panel falls from 10 feet, it will destroy whatever it lands on. If that's your head, you are going to hospital. Never try and just push a sea stand if it's sandbagged. If you need to move a sea stand that's under weight, first lower it, try and balance it, take the sandbag off, move it, put the sandbag back on. Don't try and push the whole thing sandbagged at all. It's going to cause a disaster. With weight on film sets, you always want to be using a margin of safety. So if a arm of a sea stand can hold 30 pounds, you don't want to put 29 pounds on it. You want to put 15 pounds on it. Never want to push your equipment to the edge because you're always going to miscalculate or there's going to be a cable that's too short, or someone who doesn't know what they're doing is going to try and help out and someone's going to get injured. So understand that anything that is up high is a danger and the people that should be dealing with that need to understand what they're doing and be qualified. Next on the list is electricity and that's no real surprise. Everyone knows that power is dangerous, that you can get shocked if you don't know what you're doing. With the advent of LEDs and low power lights, there's a lot less generators on set, there's a lot less upscale power on set, but that doesn't mean that you're safe. The most common way to get zapped on set is with damaged cables or damaged equipment. A stinger that's been run over by the Dolly one too many times and the cable becomes live and the next person that touches that sea stand is going to get 240 volts. There was an experience at my production company in Australia where a set of lights had been used for years and years and finally wires inside the lights became loose and the next person to turn them on went to hospital. It's important to have the lights or anything that has electricity going into it like a fog or a hazer to be checked regularly by an electrician to make sure that nothing's coming loose, to make sure that it's still going to work the way that it needs to work. The next thing we're looking at is heights. While I was researching this video, I came across an LA Times article from 2014 and it listed 205 production accents in Hollywood. The vast majority of them were falls, falling off things, falling onto things, people who regularly would be careful around heights once they have a camera on their shoulder or they have people waiting for them. They disregard their common sense, they get too close to the edge, they get distracted and they get hurt. Anything like climbing, like going up on a scissor lift, climbing a ladder is a two-person job. It's someone to spot you, someone to stabilize the ladder and again use your margin of safety. Don't stand on tiptoes on the top stair of a ladder you're going to fall and if you can't reach something with the tools you have get different tools. If the ladder isn't high enough to reach that rigging in the ceiling, you just have to go and get a scissor lift or a bigger ladder. Don't try and put the ladder on a table. The sheet rigs is full of terrible, terrible examples of how people put their lives and careers in danger just to adjust to light. It's not worth it. Now you may think I would never do any of these dumb things. I wouldn't put a huge weight on a loose C stand or use a faulty wired light or stand on the top rung of a ladder. But the most dangerous thing on a film set is actually fatigue. We work long hours. Don't get enough rest too often. It really affects our mental capacity to judge and assess risk and act safely. The first thing you need to do as a filmmaker and a producer is make sure that the people around you are getting enough rest to not kill themselves when they come to work or on the drive home. I would say fatigue is a factor in almost every onset injury. Whether it's driving to or from set, whether it's cutting your finger off on a saw, whether it's falling off a roof, fatigue and tiredness plays a huge role in misassessing risk and taking chances that you shouldn't. Filmmaking is a long game. Very rarely does someone break out in one particular film. It takes dozens of projects to make the right connections. It takes several feature films to get your work recognized. We need to be in this for the long haul. The only way we can do that is to stay safe, look after one another and set a great example for those around us. Take care of yourself, fulfill your potential and I will see you next time.