Using our toolkit

What is the Whole Picture Toolkit?

This Toolkit is a comprehensive package of mini guides for all stages of production, from development and pre-production, to production and post-production, including helpful resources, industry case studies and links to other useful industry support. It aims to guide you in having conversations about mental health with your teams right from the start, and gives you the resources to put useful systems and procedures in place to provide practical mental health support, as well as offering help with your production’s specific needs.  

How to use it  

If you’re coming to this at the beginning of production, we suggest you start in the pre-production section and work your way through in a linear way. However, the Toolkit has been designed to be of benefit, whatever stage you may be at. You might also come to it looking for help with a specific area – like training, recruitment or bullying and harassment – and these sections can be viewed independently from the others.  

Some of these suggestions or ways of working may already be in place on your current production, so we’ve designed it so you can pick and choose what is most helpful, relevant, and practical. We know that it’s not always possible to do everything, so take the elements and suggestions you can, and are able to resource. You can always expand on and build in the other elements at a later stage. It’s a journey in the right direction.   

What next?

The film and TV industry is fast evolving, as are the needs of those behind the scenes. This Toolkit was built with industry professionals representing many genres and sizes of production – but there will always be innovations and new ideas, which is why we are committing to regular updates. 

And we want your help. If you’re using the Toolkit and you think it would work better with more information, or if you have come up with a new way to approach and improve mental health and wellbeing on a production, let us know. If there is anything missing or you’ve done any research or created resources or policies which might benefit others, tell us and we will try to incorporate it. 

Like everything we produce, we want this Toolkit to be helpful, accurate and genuinely useful, as well as led by expert voices working in the industry today. 

​It explores complex and difficult issues such as bullying, racism and harassment. Some of these are structural and require fundamental change. We are aware that policy in this space is evolving and developing all the time, as are definitions and best practices, which is why all future iterations will not only evolve our contribution in these areas, but will also make sure multiple voices are listened to and represented. If you have any suggestions, please get in touch – let’s bring about culture change that works for everyone

Disclaimer

The Whole Picture Toolkit provides a set of resources and suggestions that help production companies to produce mentally healthy TV and film productions.

How the Toolkit is used and deployed by production companies is, however, entirely in their discretion, and no assurance or guarantee is given that use of the Toolkit will eliminate or address all mental health issues that can arise in the context of a production.

The information in the Toolkit is for educational/advisory purposes only.  It does not constitute legal advice.

Specific professional advice should be sought if production companies need assistance in the interpretation of or deployment of the content set out in the Toolkit.