California is about to reshape how safety is managed on set.

As of July 2025, any production receiving the Film & Television Tax Credit 4.0 must comply with the Safety on Productions Pilot Program (SPPP). It’s a first-of-its-kind, state-mandated framework for managing on-set risk requiring an independent, full-time Safety Advisor and the digitising of core safety workflows.

For producers, this brings new responsibilities and, if compliance slips, new risks. Here’s what you need to know, and how SetConnect can help.

What is the SPPP?

Who’s Eligible?

You are, if you’re claiming the California tax credit and meet the following thresholds:

Minimum Budget:

• $1 million+ per project or episode (features, pilots, new or relocating series)
• Independent productions must stay under $10 million total to qualify

Ineligible:

• Reality, documentary, current affairs, student films, and variety shows
• Productions also claiming the Soundstage Construction Program in the same year (unless specifically exempt)

What the Law Says (in plain terms)

Here’s what SB 132 actually requires from your production team:

• Hire or assign a safety advisor to perform risk assessments in consultation with department heads.
• The advisor retains autonomy to address risk, including authority to halt production.
• The advisor shall prepare and submit a final safety evaluation within 60 days of wrap.
• All risk assessments must be electronically accessible to performers, crew, and union reps upon request.

What This Means for Producers

Put simply, this is no longer a check-the-box exercise. The SPPP creates a daily, on-record obligation that will be actively reviewed by regulators and potentially audited. Producers now face:

• Increased documentation and oversight
• New reporting timelines and formats
• A need for transparency across departments and stakeholders
• Legal exposure if safety documentation is incomplete or inaccessible

Trying to manage all of this through spreadsheets, shared drives, or emails isn’t just inefficient, it’s risky.

How SetConnect Closes the Compliance Gap

SetConnect is the only on-set safety platform purpose-built for productions. We work hand-in-hand with safety professionals to help you meet your obligations under the SPPP without disrupting the pace of your shoot.

1. Built for the Safety Advisor’s Workflow

The SPPP centers the role of the Safety Advisor. SetConnect gives them the tools to:

• Log and distribute daily safety meeting notes
• Create and update risk and hazard assessments
• Capture stop-work decisions with justification and timestamps
• Track safety activity across departments, units, or locations

2. Post-Wrap Reporting Made Easy

Productions must now submit a final safety evaluation within 60 days of wrap. With SetConnect, safety data is already logged, timestamped, and linked, so your final report is audit-ready, without the scramble.

3. Secure Sharing & Labor Transparency

SB 132 mandates electronic access to all safety documents for crew and labor organizations. SetConnect supports:

• Role-based access for cast, crew, and unions
• Real-time mobile access on set
• Full audit trails and version history
• Secure document controls to meet compliance and privacy standards

4. One Platform. No Guesswork.

Producers face overlapping requirements: Cal/OSHA, firearm safety logs, union transparency, advisor qualifications. SetConnect helps you centralize it all:

• Track Safety Advisor credentials
• Standardize forms and reporting
• Reduce admin time and liability risk

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California’s new safety standards are serious, and for producers, they’re unavoidable. But with the right infrastructure, they don’t have to slow you down.

SetConnect gives your team the visibility, tools, and documentation needed to meet SPPP obligations with confidence.

Whether you’re prepping a pilot, running a high-risk day, or wrapping a multi-episode series, we’re here to support you and your Safety Advisor every step of the way.

Need help planning your next shoot?

Explore how SetConnect helps crews act on what they already know.

On any given day, a production set operates like a living system: shifting, adapting, moving fast. What keeps it running isn’t just creative talent or technical skill, it’s real-time coordination. And in that environment, safety can’t afford to lag behind.

What we’re seeing across high-performing sets isn’t just a shift in tools, but a shift in mindset. The best crews aren’t just complying with safety protocols, they’re integrating them seamlessly into their workflow. That’s only possible when the information they need is clear, current, and accessible from anywhere.

Mobile-first systems don’t just speed things up. They reframe how safety functions. A rigger can flag a live hazard from their phone while walking the perimeter. A new cast member can self-complete their induction before stepping on set. A location change or weather alert can trigger an update that hits everyone’s device in seconds.

These aren’t edge cases, they’re now standard expectations. Just as crews expect real-time call sheet changes or cloud-based script updates, they expect safety to be just as responsive.

We’ve watched productions use SetConnect to simplify what used to take hours. Inductions that once involved printers and clipboards now take minutes. Risk assessments and safety briefs stay live and visible. No bottlenecks. No gaps. No missed handovers.

The takeaway isn’t just that mobile matters, it’s that modern crews work better when safety is treated with the same urgency, fluidity, and respect as the rest of production.

SetConnect was built for exactly that: a faster, clearer, crew-first approach to safety.

Explore how SetConnect helps crews act on what they already know.

There’s a story Matt Damon tells about having dinner with Tom Cruise. They were talking about the Mission: Impossible stunt where Cruise runs down the side of a skyscraper. Damon, who’s afraid of heights, asked him how he pulled it off.

Cruise, laser-focused, explained that he’d been dreaming about that shot for fifteen years. When he finally had the chance to do it, he pitched it to the safety advisor who immediately said, “You can’t do that. It’s too dangerous.”

Cruise’s response? “So I got another safety guy.”

It’s hilarious when Matt Damon tells it, but there’s a lot to be admired in that answer. Cruise didn’t ignore the risk. He didn’t push through recklessly. He simply found someone who could help him figure out how to make it happen safely. That’s the difference. For Cruise, safety’s job wasn’t to say no. It was to help him say yes, wisely.

Because when safety is done right, it doesn’t block the art, it unlocks it.

And when safety works the way it should, that’s what you see. The crane operator whose already checked the harness twice. The stunt team who shave hours off reset time because their rigging protocols are tight. The 1st AD who never has to ask, “Who hasn’t been inducted yet?”

You don’t see chaos. You see clarity. Because when crews have tools that match their pace, safety stops being a distraction. It becomes part of the flow. Issues are raised early. Fixes are fast. No one’s digging through shared folders or chasing paperwork after wrap. They’re already onto the next setup.

This is what productions using SetConnect report time and again. Not just better compliance, but smoother days. Less second-guessing. More shared ownership. More confidence to go bigger, because everyone knows the risks are managed. Not just theoretically, but in practice.

It doesn’t mean there aren’t surprises. It means the team is equipped to handle them.

When safety is embedded into the rhythm of the day, it helps you move, it gives producers confidence, it gives crew autonomy, and it gives the story room to stretch.

Ready to shift from firefighting to flow? Explore how SetConnect can help.

Producers know the stakes: one incident can ripple across an entire project, delaying schedules, triggering claims, and raising red flags with insurers. And while everyone understands the importance of safety, what often gets overlooked is how it’s documented. That’s often the difference between a smooth claim and a costly dispute.

Behind the scenes, insurance brokers aren’t just looking for whether you had a safety plan. They’re looking for evidence: clear records, time-stamped reports, a traceable chain of action. That’s where most productions fall short. Documents get misplaced. Forms aren’t standardized. Risk assessments are saved locally, or not at all. And when something goes wrong, it’s hard to reconstruct what happened, let alone prove you did the right thing.

The claim process isn’t always as simple as reporting an incident and receiving a payout. Once a claim is lodged, insurers want a detailed account of what occurred, what steps were taken to prevent it, and how the production responded. They examine timing, reporting accuracy, and whether procedures were actually followed. If there’s a gap in the record, it can raise doubt and delay resolution. That’s where the financial risk escalates. A lack of clarity doesn’t just frustrate claims managers. It can compromise your ability to recover losses.

Digital safety systems change that equation. When tools like SetConnect are in place, every hazard report, site induction, and risk review is logged, centralised, and time-stamped. It becomes easy to demonstrate not just that safety was considered, but that it was actively managed. For insurance providers, that level of visibility builds trust. For productions, it strengthens your position in a claim.

We’ve had brokers tell us directly: productions using digital safety platforms are easier to insure. Not only because the risk profile is clearer, but because there’s less ambiguity when something happens. Underwriters hate grey areas. SetConnect helps eliminate them.

The underwriting process is built on risk assessment. Insurers evaluate everything from the complexity of the shoot to the number of locations and crew involved. But increasingly, they also want to see how productions manage that complexity. Are hazards logged in real time? Are risk assessments kept up to date? Can crew access site-specific safety info instantly? Platforms like SetConnect provide that operational transparency. The more structured and auditable your safety approach is, the less likely you are to face delays, escalations, or exclusions when it counts.

That kind of preparedness also resonates with studios and investors alike. As safety regulations evolve, including mandatory advisors in places like California and increasing union oversight globally, productions are under growing pressure to show that safety isn’t just an afterthought. They need to prove it’s part of the production fabric. Not just a binder on a desk, but a live system that adapts in real time.

For producers operating with studio oversight, investor pressure, or tight margins, this isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a strategic asset. Digital safety infrastructure doesn’t just protect your crew, it protects your production’s financial and reputational standing.

Better safety records start with better tools.

Explore how SetConnect can help

There’s a quiet truth on set that rarely gets said out loud: even in the most well-run productions, safety can slip into the background.

Film and TV sets are high-performance environments. They run on precision, momentum, and trust. Every department is balancing competing pressures. The clock is ticking, the schedule is tight, and the creative stakes are high. Everyone’s doing their job at speed, often anticipating problems before they happen. In that context, anything that doesn’t feel directly tied to getting the day made can start to feel peripheral, even when it’s not.

What we hear, again and again, from producers and crew alike, is that safety starts to feel like a parallel process, something outside the rhythm of the shoot. It’s treated as a compliance chore rather than a creative asset. The paperwork is clunky. The protocols feel like a barrier. And even the most diligent teams start cutting corners just to keep up.

This isn’t a case of apathy. It’s a case of misalignment.

When safety tools and workflows don’t reflect the real pace of production, people disengage. And when they disengage, they take shortcuts. Not out of laziness, but out of necessity.

The fix isn’t more rules. It’s better rhythm.

Safety has to move at the same speed as the rest of the set. It has to live in crew’s hands, not buried in a binder or lost in a shared drive. If something’s changed on location, teams need to know right then, not at the next wrap meeting. If a hazard crops up mid-scene, the system should let someone flag it with a tap, not a form. If crew want to be responsible, the tools should let them act, not wait.

This is where the old model breaks down. Traditional systems are designed for record-keeping. But production is about decision-making – it’s live, deliberate and high-stakes. And that means safety needs to be more than documented. It needs to be actionable.

We built SetConnect because we’d lived through the friction ourselves. We knew what it meant to lose an hour chasing signatures. To watch the briefings get looser as the schedule got tighter. To see talented, committed crews stuck with processes that didn’t match the way they worked.

The goal isn’t to make people care more about safety. They already do. The goal is to give them systems that make it easier to act on that care in real time, on the ground, without derailing the day.

Safety doesn’t need to slow you down. In the right hands, it’s what keeps you moving.

Explore how SetConnect helps crews act on what they already know.