Additional research: The BBFC

During production of our pieces, me and Lucy did more research into the media film industry and even went as far as to lookin at ways in which we could distribute our pieces of media. We did a brief brain storm and charted off all if the possible places in which we could put our trailer and media products in order for them to gain recognition and popularity. The most popular websites were Youtue, Facebook and Twitter. We looked at things such as Twitter Trending topic promotion where films and popular companies gain more popularity by paying Twitter to advertise their product or film.



This seemed like a reasonable piece of media convergence because over the last couple of years, Twitter's popularity has sky-rocketed and is almost as successful as large and extremely networking site, Facebook.
Not only did we look at websites, but we thought along the lines off "What if we actually decide to make this film, how would we distribute it?" And box office and cinema realease looked good, but once looking at film that had been released in the cinema, we saw that most of them have one thing in common, they all have age certificates.

Now, by watching a DVD of the work that the BBFC does and seeing and understand their role in the industry, we decided that although age ratings are never usually seen on the poster or magazine, they are very vital to making a film.
There are certain guidlines that must be abided by in order for a film to stay within a certain age band.
To get a 'U' (Univeral rating)
"Suitable for all ‘U’ film should be
suitable for audiences aged four
years and over. ‘U’ films should    
be set within a positive moral

framework and should offer
reassuring counterbalances to
any violence, threat or horror.
If a work is particularly suitable
for a pre-school child to view
alone, this will be indicated in
the Consumer Advice." - Quote taken from BBFC guildline booklet

And in terms of putting horror in a U film, it should be (according to the BBFC):
"Scary sequences should be mild, brief and unlikely to
cause undue anxiety to young children. The outcome
should be reassuring."

We then looked at the 12a band to see if our trailer could fit into this criteria. Me and lucy found out that 12A if for 12 year old and older and theBBFC's specific guildine for horror in a 12A film is that it can include some blood, but not substantial amounts of violence and like the U rating, should have some sort of positive outcome, if possible.

In past years, the BBFC has been scorned for allowing very violent films into the wrong bands.
For example, I read an article on The Dark Knight and that whilst it gained an amazing gross in the first week breaking a world record for largest grossing film, it also broke the record for most complaints to the BBFC in one week. "The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) in the UK gave the movie a classification of 12A, similar to a PG-13 rating from the MPAA in the States. It means children age 12 can see the movie unaccompanied, but an adult must bring anyone under 12. For the record there’s also a 15." - News In Film article 2008 This proving that although there are guidlines against certain amounts of violence in movies, certain people have certain violence thresh-holds and are more willing to let certain things slip.

 Now, by watching some of the scariest horror movies, we found out that a lot of them have endings in which leave you uneasy and nervous, so this shows that our piece would not fit into the 12a rating because we want that same uneasy and uncomfortable feeling to be in our film.

Although we knew that when we were making our pieces of media, that we didn't want it to be for children, we still decided to look at the bands in which our pieces could fit into because true horror films are usually 18's or considerably 15's.

After a while, the ratings become self-explanatory. 15 is for any persons above the age of 15.
The BBFC's horror guidline says this for 15's: Strong threat and menace are permitted unless sadistic
or sexualised.
Now by looking at some of the J-horror pieces in which we have use as stimuli and drive, we realised that the sadist theme is common so we wouldn't be able to fit our film into that band.
Finally, we explored the 18 band and found out that our pieces would fit into here as we not only wanted our pieces to scare, we wanted to shadow the work of Sato, and we aimed to make our pieces disturbing.


Fenetta