‘What Are Students Doing When We Aren’t Looking? A Hermeneutic Phenomenological Exploration of Risk Management on a Student Film Shoot’ EdD Transcriptions Data Booklet

East, Annabel (2025) ‘What Are Students Doing When We Aren’t Looking? A Hermeneutic Phenomenological Exploration of Risk Management on a Student Film Shoot’ EdD Transcriptions Data Booklet.

This booklet includes the transcriptions from VR elicitation that informed the EdD thesis ‘What Are Students Doing When We Aren’t Looking? A Hermeneutic Phenomenological Exploration of Risk Management on a Student Film Shoot’. The welcome protocol provides additional context to the transcriptions. Thesis Abstract Beyond the completion of a risk assessment, Higher Education (HE) providers of media education are broadly unaware of how or if student filmmakers are keeping themselves safe on their film shoots. The aim of this research project was to gain an understanding of how one group of undergraduate students experience their film set in terms of the gap between risk as imagined, before a shoot takes place, and risk as performed, through filmmaking practice. By discovering how the group of undergraduate students make meaning of their collaborative filmmaking processes and practices, this research project engaged with the limited available literature on higher education filmmaking and risk management. Through a hermeneutic phenomenological lens this study developed a method of VR (Virtual Reality) elicitation. This method foregrounds a virtual peripheral participant which enabled students to take notice and reflect holistically on their own practice. The study reflects on the affordances and implication of VR elicitation in relation to an undergraduate student film shoot, as well as its potential use in the professional film and TV industry. The contribution to knowledge of this study is the discovery that a hierarchy of discourse and a morality of filmmaking practice contribute to a unique student-participant risk culture: that risk culture can lead to conditions for neglect. The implication for pedagogy of media production is that the incremental erosion of safety is not seen or known by HE educators and not understood by students. There is no evidence of recklessness, but there is a creeping neglect that had hitherto gone unnoticed. The study finds that students do not have the opportunity to participate more holistically in health and safety risk management due to the rigid linearity of the perceived risk management process that is also shrouded in bureaucracy. Virtual peripheral participation offers a way to enable students to take notice and to reflect holistically on their practice with potential for adapting for use in the film and TV industry. The significance of the contribution is that it bridges some of the gaps between procedures and practice (industry-facing) and between theory and practice (research-facing) by offering up VR elicitation and hermeneutic analysis as an alternative way to surface tacit understandings of practice. The gap between risk as imagined and risk as performed is bridged by understanding the morality of practice and the hierarchy of discourse where the creative trumps the mundane.