Twelve and Twelve rule

Initially when the schedule is made people get really excited, by people I mean the fans. But when you think about it, they don’t consider the issues that often set back the production a little. Issues like troubles with getting permissions, personal issues, technical issues etc etc.  And in the end when movies and tv series are announced to come out a little later than planned they are disappointed. But what they don’t think about are the crew. More often than not people are on set over twelve hours, which in a everyday job is seen as unacceptable. Yet still during a movie production it’s seen as a normal thing. “The worst day I ever worked on a show was 27 hours.” Steve D’Amato says. “You feel trapped with the hours, because you know that if you don’t do them, someone else will.” “It regularly happens when overly optimistic scheduling falls prey to bad luck, like cameras breaking, incompetence, and director egomania.”

After the death of Brent Lon Hershman, who died in a car accident in which he fell asleep while driving home from work after a nineteen hour shit on the set of Pleasantville Haskell Wexler, an American cinematographer, started an organization which supports a ‘twelve and twelve rule’. A twelve and twelve rule is nothing more than a twelve hour shift followed by a mandatory twelve hour rest, and no more than six hour between meals, and is supposed to apply to all industry workers. “John Lindley and the crew of Pleasantville were terribly upset about the conditions that were going on, and it was set off by Brent Hershman’s death while driving home…” said Haskell Wexler. According to a study by the British Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, after a 17-19 hours without sleep, the performance on some tests was equivalent or worse than that at a BAC (blood alcohol content) of 0.05%.