Health and Safety for Film and Theatre

When working in a studio environment it is important to consider health and safety. The short brief included the important measures we needed to take in to consideration when planning and building our own sets. This included using the correct Fire- retardant that is a safety measure. This is because the retardant makes it harder for the fire to spread in a place where there are exposed fabrics or work involving chemical processes. These materials may range from such as costumes consisting of materials ranging from natural to acrylic fibres, to timber, plywood and textures for flats, hair-wig fibres. Firstly everything on stage has to be treated with the correct fire retardant before being allowed either on set or being built on set. The different classes of fireproofing include NDFR (none durable-water soluble solution). DFR, which is a chemically treated flame-retardant but the effectiveness of it, will be compromised after a number of times. The correct flame-retardant to use on any exposed fabrics such as drapes or curtains is DFR. IFR (inherently flame retardant) which has a high percentage of yarn that is naturally a retardant. It is the chemical makeup of raw fibres that is the retardant, not an after treatment. Another form of fire proofing is by using Flame bar a different formula to flame-retardant. When fire proofing any polystyrene objects use scrim and watered down PVA. It is important to remember to make sure the layers are over lapped with each other. The brown MDF is usually the standard one used in sets. There is also a pink one, which is fire resistant, which has two classes 1 and 0. Class 1 is treated to ensure a low surface spread of the flame and class 0 treatment means it is limited combustibility. These can be used to fulfil a specific scene in a film; such as if it needed to be constantly raining then the water resistant MDF would be used.

We were advised to order Flints Catalogue as a possible source for materials we needed to fire proof http://www.flints.co.uk/pdfifles/flambar.pdf