Equipment list- Or a shopping list for digital production

 How is it useful

So when we talk about lists I guess an immediate list that you would think of is a Christmas or shopping one as the defaults and to some extent you'd be thinking along those lines with this one too. Only when it comes to production its less about what you wish you had and more of a list of items that you will use for making the thing.

It's genuinely that simple. Now the use of an equipment list is important as you can keep track of items in a production which is especially important when renting equipment or scheduling for timetabled use of equipment like an boom mike from the office as it allows the production to keep track of what they start with and then what they end with or to ensure that any equipment that's used (like a camera) which takes from the actual production itself can be marked for easy identification of what needs to be taken for the file transfer.

There's also additional legal protection that can be gotten from having this list and from it a fair bit of detail within it, so say for example you rent a camera for your production and when you collect you notice there's some pre-existing damage with it having pictures and the evidence against the equipment itself protects you from having to pay any extra unnecessary cash.

Now below is a screenshot of the equipment list I generated for this production in order to show how this relates to the main topic of discussion:

So here you can see my example of what an equipment list looks like and more importantly what sort of detail is needed for them to be used effectively. Now I have covered the camera portion side of things extensively in the Budgeting post of the costing and why but the others need a bit of explaining so lets go through them in order.

The first is the microphone now as we have these in house we don't really need to cover pricing or things like this but it is liked to the second thing that I have included here and that is Photographs of before and after production. This is more the help of us than say our client. If objects and the like get damaged during the production then we may need to claim back for the damages recieved now of course the client could come back with risk assessment details and other such details which would make our claims all but void. So how can we avoid it? Well we have to head back into the legal barrel once again and cover ourselves.

The best way to make sure that we keep covered not only for ourselves but our actors too we can invest in what's called Public Liability Insurance our research of this came from a website called filmmaking.net where they talk about what types of insurance are the bets for filmmakers and the like and we come under this bracket. In essence what's being said is that Public Liability is the highest recommended and gives the best coverage incase things go wrong during production like damage of property or injury on set during the filming of the production. This is great as we are filming in a public location that could have a lot of hazards (as previously discussed in the Legal post) so making sure that we are covered is great.

Now unfortunately I couldn't find out if this covered rental property or not and this is a big thing as the cameras (and the lights however these are in contingency and backup plan they aren't covered as in-depth) are rental property that we then have to return to the company and we are liable for the welfare and use of equipment given to us therefore we need to consider coverage in the case of damages done to the equipment while filming.

Well hopefully this has given you a good idea and look at how useful an equipment list can be and what it can do to help you and your production not to mention how much easier it will be to keep track of all the items.

Have a great day!