Failure mapping for occupational safety management in the film and television industry

In the film and television industry, a wide range of risks in processes of launching new products (series, soap operas or films) can cause accidents and affect the health and safety of crews. Besides potential personal injuries, as a business, the whole production process in under risk, since if a key player (e.g.: the main actor/actress) gets severely injured or dies, he/she cannot be replaced and the project can be paralyzed, causing difficulties to the company. This article purposes to identify the most critical process in relation to the occurrence of accidents, evaluating the failures of the activities of this critical process, and understanding their causes, to enable formulating treatment plans. We performed a case study of a large film and television producer in Brazil: A committee of experts identified filming as the most critical process. We mapped the activities of this process, the potential failures and their causes through a FMEA, identifying 15 modes of failure in the process and 32 potential elements that cause these failures. Combining and ranking those elements, 12 causes were considered critical and FTA was applied to identify their root causes. The result was a procedure to analyze process failures tailored to the film and television industry, as well as complete and objective visualization of the possible faults in this process, enabling the company to correct them and providing elements for other researchers to investigate this rich but as yet little explored theme.