APA COVID-19 Shooting Guidelines Published

The APA Covid-19 Guidelines can be downloaded HERE.

The Prime Minister confirmed in his statement last night what has always been the position: “work from home if you can, but you should go to work if you can’t work from home.”

The purpose of our guidelines is to enable production companies to take reasonable and practical steps to safeguard the health and safety of everyone attending a film shoot in relation to Covid-19 and to meet their obligations under the Health and Safety Act, and law, and Government regulations on Covid-19. Production companies have that responsibility, which they can meet by following these guidelines.

In addition, everyone working on the production and attending it has responsibilities in respect of Covid-19. They too can meet them by complying with these guidelines.

Part of that is the Health Declaration Form at Appendix 1, which as per the guidelines, must be completed by anyone before they can attend the shoot.

The guidelines will be updated regularly in response to feedback on how they work in practice, new Government law and regulation and the potential availability of practical on-set Covid-19 testing.

The IPA is sharing the guidelines with its members, which we hope will be an important step in giving agencies and their clients confidence that sound guidelines are in place and that with the commitment of APA members to implement them, they can work with APA members to make films.

Thank you to the following for their invaluable help in creating these guidelines: Polly Leach, my colleague Martin Poyner, Lucy Banks, Ben Roberts, Fran Thompson, Justin Edmund-White, James Bland, Paul Greaves from 1st Option and the APA Council.

There is an opportunity for us to discuss the guidelines on an APA members Zoom call later today and we will also be providing members with details of another Zoom call this week, where Paul Greeves from 1st Option, the health and safety company will join Steve to discuss implementing these guidelines and health and safety in relation to Coronavirus generally.

There will be further updates on insurance, contractual liability and health and safety this week.