Production - Paperwork

If you’re showing people on video and publishing to the world (which you are!), you need to make sure you have appropriate consent. For under 16s, this means permission from parents or guardians too.

Schools probably have their own procedures for securing permission, and may already have blanket consent in place. Do check, though.

For everyone else, we’re in the process of simplifying our paperwork and producing examples you can use. In the meantime, you’ll want to write a simple document that:

  1. Outlines what you’re doing (making a film for publication on a website).
  2. Says who’s in charge (usually a teacher or youth group leader).
  3. Specifies who the participant is.
  4. Is signed by the participant, to show that they’re aware of what they’re getting into.
  5. For participants under the age of consent: is signed by their parent or guardian, to show that they agree too.

There’s nothing scary about any of this — you’re simply putting yourself in a position where you can show that everyone involved knew what they were doing, and they knew that the film would be published online.

Ownership

Note that the film remains your property throughout. As part of the submission process, you agree to a specific publication license — but we don’t ask that you transfer ownership or copyright of the film to SciCast. This keeps things simpler overall, and means you can do whatever you like with your film as well as give it to us (you’re welcome to publish it on YouTube, for example).

But it also means that the responsibility for ensuring all participants give appropriate consent is yours.

Child Protection

We go to great lengths to keep things like your email address secure. For obvious reasons, we prefer not to identify children clearly.

Our preference is that your film should use a team name only, and we strongly recommend you avoid identifying individuals by full name.

We also recommend not identifying the school or organisation, but understand that many schools wish to be recognised in credits, for example. Check the policy of your school or youth group, and drop us a line if you’ve any queries or concerns.