Lab Safety Video Project

Summer 2024 · Faculty Special Project Stipend, Office of Academic Affairs

Objective

The goal of the project was a safety video made for the Chemistry Department at Ventura College and its own lab safety procedures, so that safety instruction is more relevant and students engage with and remember the protocols. Rather than a long, generic safety film of the kind organizations such as the American Chemical Society publish, the video breaks the department's own safety checklist into short scenes matched to what students will do in our labs.

The department had tried this before I arrived. The plan then was to make the videos with CAPS, the local community media organization, and it did not finish: the arrangement covered filming but not the editing without further cost, and what had been shot was not good enough to use. Six rough cuts from February 2019 survive, one per technique. The fire blanket scene is the clearest case: the person wraps the blanket around themselves standing up and walks out of frame, and the clip ends there, fourteen seconds long, without the part where you get down on the floor. When I mentioned in my interview that I had done video work, a video the department could make in house became possible, and the request came to me.

The work was funded as a Faculty Special Project Stipend for Summer 2024 and carried out with Antonia Flores, with laboratory technician Kai Liang supporting the filming.

Development

Planning. In April 2024 I wrote to the department's faculty with the plan and its stages, showed example video styles, and asked which safety procedures to include and what format would fit their teaching. I drew the storyboard; Antonia Flores and Kai Liang reviewed it slide by slide, and at the end of May the revised version went to the department with a three-day shooting plan.

Preparation. I set the scenes for each shooting day and how many student workers each needed, and Antonia and Kai arranged the dates with the student workers. I sent out the attire for the safe and unsafe examples, which they passed on to the student workers, and I set up the equipment on each shooting day.

Filming. Three sessions of roughly two hours each, covering scenarios such as using an eyewash station, handling chemicals, and appropriate lab attire.

Editing and post-production. Footage was processed in stages with departmental feedback at each step; the edit was brought to visual consistency with color grading, and closed-captioned for accessibility. Several versions were produced (with and without background music, combined and segmented) in MP4, GIF, and PowerPoint with embedded GIFs, for flexibility in how it is shown.

Feedback and refinement. Clip order, captions, and graphics were revised on departmental input.

Final product and implementation

The completed video is a visual guide to common lab safety mistakes and best practice, in three forms: one for in-class presentation, one for on-demand viewing on Canvas, and a segmented version that can be attached to individual lab sessions. I show it on the first day of class, colleagues have shown it in their own sections, and it remains available on Canvas for reference throughout the term.

Challenges

Lighting consistency. The shooting window was short, and the lighting could not be reset for every scene, so color varied between shots. It was corrected in grading.

Timeline. The project ran alongside a summer teaching assignment, so editing was prioritized to finish before the fall semester.

Distribution and follow-up projects

The video was posted to the chemistry department's Canvas so that any instructor can copy it into their own course, which is how it reached sections other than mine. I have also been told, in conversation, that departments outside chemistry have used it.

Discussions with faculty and administrators at the time pointed to next steps: additional videos on specific techniques and equipment handling; versions that students working with interpreters can review at their own pace; a pre-lab video series for the laboratory courses ahead of the college's move to a compressed calendar; and collaboration with other departments whose labs could use the same approach. Several of these have since happened: the CHEM V104 and V101 video libraries continue this project.