Consent frameworks before the first shoot day

Last month a producer called me on a Friday afternoon, three days before principal photography began. She needed someone to “check in with cast” during an emotional interview sequence. When I asked if consent protocols had been established, she paused. “We have release forms,” she said. I asked if the subjects understood what kind of questions they’d be asked, whether they had veto power over certain topics, what the plan was if someone became distressed. Another pause. “That’s… that’s what we were hoping you’d handle on set.”

This happens more than it should. Producers treat sensitivity consulting like crisis management—something you bring in when trouble appears, not before. But consent isn’t a checkbox on shoot day. It’s architecture. You can’t retrofit it into a production that’s already moving. By the time crew is on location and cameras are rolling, the power dynamics are set, the stakes are raised, and your options for creating genuine safety have narrowed considerably. The subjects have already committed. The schedule is locked. The pressure to “get the shot” overrides nearly every other consideration.

Pre-production is when you have room to breathe. It’s when you can ask uncomfortable questions without a meter running. It’s when you can redesign an approach, rethink an interview strategy, or realize that a particular scene requires a different crew configuration. I’ve worked with producers who understood this—who brought me in during development, when the treatment was still a draft and the shooting plan was flexible. Those productions run smoother. The relationships with subjects are stronger. The footage is more honest, because people aren’t bracing against violation. They’re participating in a structure they helped shape.

The work looks different in pre-production. It starts with the interview guide. Not just the questions you’ll ask, but how you’ll ask them, in what order, with what preamble. What happens if someone refuses to answer? What if they start to answer and then stop? I help producers think through these scenarios before they’re happening in real time with a DP waiting and a sound recordist getting room tone. We map out which topics require explicit advance consent, not just a general release. We identify where power imbalances exist—employer/employee, documented/undocumented, expert/subject—and build in structural protections.

This is also when you establish what I call “exit architecture”—the mechanisms that allow someone to withdraw or pause without derailing everything. It’s not enough to say “you can stop anytime.” People need to know what stopping looks like. Do they say a specific word? Do they signal the producer? Is there a producer in the room, or is it just them and the director? Will the crew keep rolling if they start crying, or is there a protocol? These aren’t hypotheticals. I’ve watched productions where a subject clearly wanted to stop but didn’t know how, and the crew didn’t know they should. The resulting footage was unusable anyway—you can see the distress, the lack of authentic consent. But the damage was done.

Another layer: cultural and contextual research. If you’re documenting a community you’re not part of, pre-production is when you learn what you don’t know. What are the norms around eye contact, around discussing family, around being filmed in certain spaces? What historical traumas might your presence activate? I worked on a project in Eastern Europe where the director wanted to film interviews in subjects’ homes. Reasonable idea, except that in this particular community, inviting cameras into your home carried associations with surveillance and state control. We pivoted to a neutral location that subjects helped choose. That only happened because we had the conversation a month before shooting, not the morning of.

Budget is always the objection. “We can’t afford a consultant during prep.” But you’re already paying for mistakes you haven’t made yet. The reshoot because a subject felt ambushed and won’t sign the release. The footage you can’t use because you didn’t establish boundaries. The post-production legal review that reveals you needed trauma-informed protocols you didn’t implement. The simplest version of my pre-production work—a half-day session with the core team—costs less than a single day of rescheduled shooting. And it often prevents problems that can’t be solved by throwing money at them later, like loss of trust or reputational damage.

What I do in those sessions is straightforward. We review the production plan with a specific lens: Where are the consent vulnerabilities? Where are we asking people to be exposed—emotionally, physically, legally, socially—and what are we offering in return? Not just payment, though that matters. I mean structural offerings: control over how they’re represented, veto power over certain content, clarity about how the footage will be used. Then we build those protections into the production documents. Call sheets that include mental health check-ins. Consent forms that specify topics, not just general image rights. A chain of communication so subjects can reach someone other than the director if they have concerns.

The best producers I work with understand that this makes their films better, not just safer. When subjects trust the process, they go deeper. When they know they have genuine control, they’re more willing to be vulnerable. The work of sensitivity consulting in pre-production isn’t about limiting what you can film. It’s about creating conditions where people can show up fully, because they’re not spending energy protecting themselves from you.

1. Consent architecture must be designed before production begins—you cannot retrofit safety into a locked shooting schedule without significant cost and limited efficacy.
2. Pre-production consultation costs less than one day of reshoots, and prevents reputational damage that no budget can repair after the fact.
3. Cultural and contextual research during prep protects both subjects and production from avoidable harm that becomes obvious only when it’s too late to course-correct.

That producer I mentioned? We didn’t work together. She needed someone to parachute in and smooth over problems that had been baked into the production design months earlier. I’m not that person. The productions I’m part of start the conversation early, when there’s still time to build something solid. When the work is hardest, it’s also most effective. That window is pre-production. After that, you’re managing consequences.

Todd Max Carey — Seven Journeys