Sunday 7 March 2010

Notional BBFC Rating

From looking at our target audience and the content of our film I think that its notional BBFC rating would be rated 15, due to me looking at the BBFC's website and their classification guidelines over the issues of:
Discrimination, Drugs, Horror, Imitable Behaviour, Language, Nudity, Sex, Theme, Violence.

The BBFC says that frequent bad language is acceptable and strong/vulgar language can be used if justified, we may have our antagonist character using bad language as signifiers of the hoody wearing youth stereotype like poor education and lack of vocabulary. Also may help to emphasise the aggression and horror of the antagonist attacking our victim and also maybe for our protagonist attacking the antagonist.
We do not have any bad language within our film opening now however, so this will not offend a younger audience in this respect but if we were to create the entire film it is likely that there would be bad language used during dialogue later on.

We will in one scene having our protagonist smoking a cigarette under the BBFC's guidelines this is acceptable as long as it is not promoting the taking of drugs, our protagonist will be smoking it as more of a prop than a promotional tool for the intake of tobacco.

For the issues of sex and nudity the BBFC says that nudity and sex are allowed without strong detail.
We would not be having much of this shown on screen but there will be sexual references and signifiers of sexual abuse/rape when the girl is being attacked by our antagonist but as I say we would prefer to imply this than show it as it is not an overly pleasant or essential part of storyline as long as the theme and basic element is there and more left to the imagination. The reference to sexual abuse and rape on screen would definately be inappropriate for a younger audience to view and so I think that by having this classed as a 15 rating is a good idea as it would protect younger innocent viewers from the more adult content.

The BBFC says that strong violence may be shown but not dwelling on infliction of pain, for example sadism, which is not something we would show on screen and much of our violence is more likely to be left to the imagination like in the famous Psycho we may not actually show penetration of the skin but more so lots of angles and match-on-action shots and showing the blood running without being too graphic.
We toned down the violence within our film and made it a lot more psychological than physically on screen, however it is likley that if we were to create the entire film that there would be more graphic violence later on in the film.
Also the BBFC allows strong menace and threat without glorifying the horror on screen so whilst we would have our protagonist killing the antagonist it would not be portraying it in a positive light. The horror is quite crucial to our storyline and so this would not really be appropriate for any younger viewers due to what could be seen as quite horrific and scary content to viewers under fifteen years old.

1 comment:

  1. Using the BBFC website, you can surely be more detailed on this, and add illustrations. Make sure you draw comparisons between your film and actual (15-rated) films too. You could draw upon the General Studies work too

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