An inventory, not an awards list

Practical action photographs as risk and is built as engineering. A fall, a fire gag, a roll, a wire pull: each is an assembly of objects with names, tolerances and owners, and each is designed so that the outcome is decided before the camera turns over. That is the subject of this publication, and the reason it is filed the way it is — by apparatus rather than by film, performer or year.

How the site is organised

Every entry in the index names one piece of kit and answers three questions about it: what force it manages, what it turns that force into, and whose hands it belongs to once the camera is running. Read across the index and the craft appears on its own, without a single anecdote about bravery.

What this is not

We are not an awards body, a production company, a training provider or an industry organisation, and we have no ceremony, categories, nominees or voting. Nothing here is instruction: we describe how a gag is built in principle, and never in a form anyone could attempt. Stunt work is done by trained crews inside a safety apparatus that took decades to assemble, and reading about it is not a substitute for any part of that.

Corrections

If something here is wrong — a component named incorrectly, a piece of practice described as current when it has changed — tell us and we will fix it and say what we fixed.