Research and Planning: London Research - BBFC Talk

While I was in London, our group also visited the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) where we were given a talk on film regulation and censorship. I learnt that films have to be sent to the BBFC where they will be viewed by an examiner who will write a report and give the film a rating. Some films want and expect a certain rating as they have a specific target audience, we were shown two clips of the latest popular saga 'The Hunger Games' of the fight scene, one contained a lot of blood and got rated a 15 certificate however the film wanted a 12A therefore they re edited the film and got rid of the blood and it then got the certificate that it wanted. This talk has helped as I know understand how our film would be rated and what content we should show if we want it to have the rating for our target audience. Our group had decided that we wanted our film to be an 18 certificate however after hearing this talk I feel this is the wrong decision for our film after all as it will narrow our audience and the scenes included would have to be violent, hardcore horror. I feel the more appropriate certificate would be 15 as it would widen our audience.