Research for production - film classifications and how it can affect our planning ideas

When creating a film part of what you have to think about is who your film is targeted at and as a result which film classification is most suitable for it. For example it would make no sense to have a film targeted at a young audience and then attempting to give it a rating of a '12'. Not only would the content of the film be deemed unacceptable for such a young audience and so is unlikely to be accepted by the BBFC, you would also be completely missing out on your target audience.

Because of this what I have decided to do is go on the British film classification website and look up what sort of content I should and shouldn't include in our film in order for it to get a '15' classification as our target audiences ages range from 15-25. Looking at the website I discovered a document which reveals the sort of content I should be including in a age '15' film and what I wasn't allowed to do, after looking at this I then realized that this will not have a big effect on my planning ideas as we now have to stick within a guideline.

Above is the guidelines explaining what sort of content a '15' film is allowed to include. Looking at this I can see that there is certain elements of our film that we must make sure sticks within these guidelines

This includes: 

• Making sure that the shot of the five teenagers threatening the suicide girl doesn't in any sort of way promote bullying or discrimination and so we must think of ways to do this without showing any endorsement of what is happening. 
• Any features of smoking in our movie must not represent it as being something good which encourages our audience to then go and smoke themselves. Instead we must highlight the consequences of this illicit behavior.
• Horror can be shown which is a good thing but we're going to have to do a detailed plan of our killer to make sure she doesn't come across as sadistic or in anyway sexualised.
• As we cannot dwell on the issue of the girl committing suicide we must plan in detail how the character dies and how we are going to present her death or if we plan not to show it at all.
• Violence is allowed to be strong and so the threat of the protagonist can be highlighted, however we aren't allowed to dwell on the violence or deaths of the victims and so we must plan i detail how each character will die and how we can limit the amount of gore used in each killing so it fits within the guidelines
• We can use strong language but it must be used within the context of the movie and mustn't be used repeatedly and so this will affect us when writing the script as we will have to think carefully about what sort of language and dialogue to include

Overall these film classifications mean that when planning from now on we have to constantly refer but to these guidelines when making any decision about what content to include in our film as we have to ensure that it fits within the guidelines we have been given. This will also effect the making of certain things like the script and the trailer for example where we are going to have to really detailed planning to make sure that all content featured in both fits within the guidelines we have been given.

Here are two videos, one explaining the content allowed in a 15 movie and the other explaining the effects these ratings can have on a movie and the reasons behind giving a movie a particular rating: