Advertising Industry Codes of Practice

• When producing our trailer, we had to look at the list of rules and regulations that would apply to us if we were producing it on a National scale, as well as some that apply to us now filming on a smaller scale. To do this, I went to the BCAP website. BCAP stands for the Broadcast Committee of Advertising Practice, and it is the company responsible for setting the correct codes of practice for advertisers.
  From there I went to the Television Advertising Standards Code document. Looking at of the Regulations, it is apparent that many of them don't apply to us as our trailer is not being broadcast to such a large extent, but some of them do comply with our trailer and therefore we decided to pick out the most important and relevent ones such as:
  

Section 6: Harm & Offence

• 6.1 Advertisements must not encourage or condone violence or cruelty- This is important as our film is about someone escaping a violent relationship and our trailer includes one scene at the beginning with mild violence. Fortunately rather than promoting it, the trailer implies that domestic abuse should be stopped.


• 6.4 Advertisements must not, without good reason, contain material which is likely to cause serious distress to significant numbers of viewers-Some of the material in our trailer could be deemed slightly distressing, which is why we tried to keep the scenes as mild as possible.


• 6.7 Advertisements must not encourage or condone behaviour prejudicial to
  health and safety and advertisements must not use techniques that may
  directly harm viewers-As we are creating a thriller, some of the scenes have implied dangerous circumstances that people get into but once again we are condoning a message to people about being stalked and trying to make people more aware of the fact that it does happen.

Section 7: Children

• 7.4 Advertisements must not contain material which could lead to social, moral or psychological harm to children-Because our trailer contains a scene that could be seen as distressing, we have given it a PG rating, which means that parents don't have to let them watch it and it should only be seen with them. Other than this, our trailer focuses more on abuse within relationships and has nothing to do with child abuse therefore it is not encouraging it.

Section 10: Religion, Faith & System of Beliefs

• 10.13 No advertisement may exploit children, or the hopes or fears of any other vulnerable category of viewer-Whilst being stalked is a fear that could affect some people, we are not exploiting or condoning it and as mentioned, we are trying to increase people's awareness of an issue that does occur. The genre of the film is thriller so it is supposed to be found slightly scary but it is also supposed to bring to light just how dangerous situations like these are.

BBFC Classifications

The main things films are classified on are:

• Violence


• Sexual Nature and Nudity


• Drug and Alcohol use


• Use of Language


• Genre
  

Because our film only contains mild violence with some bad language, and has a thriller genre, we decided to give it a certificate of 15, which means it is illegal for any one under the age of 15 to watch it. This is because it is not overly distressing to teenagers who might see it, but some parents may have an objection to their younger children viewing it due to the nature of certain scenes and occasional swearing.

On the other hand, the ratings often depend on the messages and morals portrayed by the films, and if there are clear messages in them the rating is often lower. For the trailer we decided to give it a lower rating so it could be viewed by a larger number of people. To do this we used little violence and showed no bad language which brought the certificate down to a PG (Parental Guidence). This means that the trailer can be viewed by children of any age, but it is advised that a parent or guardian is present as they may not wish their children to view certain scenes. Because of this, it would allow us to advertise on a broader scale which would increase our sales figures overall.

Film classifications differ between regions and each will have their own film classification board which will decipher the certificates for individual films. Films that may be rated PG in the USA could be rated 12 in the UK for example

Response to Feedback

In the feedback we recieved, we were asked about setting and questioned on the locations we are going to use. This has been an issue for myself and Nina-my team mate-that we are still having trouble deciding on. Unfortunately, living far away from college it poses a problem as we don't want anything filmed on college grounds, and we need to get to places far away fairly quickly before it gets dark. We have planned to film it at one of our houses and are still in question as to who lives in the most sufficient area that would be easily accessible and fit with the location we want to portray. We were also faced with the problems of having a long point of view shot that would show her well in the distance but from above. Eventually we decided on filming along the marine parade in Lyme regis, where we can stand in the gardens that over look the walkway and film it from on top of there.
Another limitation we were presented with in our feedback is getting actors/actresses that can portray the atmosphere we are trying to create by pulling off the right emotion in their acting abilities. We have decided to try and use people from the drama department who already have experience in acting and will know what to do better than someone who has never done it before. They will also be less camera shy, having been on stage enough times to cope with stage fright.

We were told that our strengths were that we have really thought about the gender representation we are trying to portray which I agree with as we want our male character to appear tall and powerful whilst the female appears weak and vulnerable, highlighting the stereotypes that focus around masculinity and femininity.
As well as this, our feedback stated that the narrative we decided to use related to every day occurences that people need to be more aware of which was what Nina and I initially planned to do. We wanted to make a trailer that would portray societal morals that people should have a higher awarity of and in this case, its stalking which is becoming increasingly common nowadays expecially with the constant increase in Web 2.0