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.