The BBFC came to town a few months ago

A few months back John Wagaland from the BBFC came in for a lecture.

Firstly it was pointed out that the BBFC is required to adhere to a large amount of legislation, but that’s understandable, the man said that the BBFC has to take great care when reviewing a film and it’s suitability for the cinema and without the legislation that would be harder to do. The sorts of legislations he presented provided a sort of guideline of how they should rate the films.

Later he actually went on to talk about the examining process for films.

Examiners have a number of duties, one of them is obviously viewing the film, it is also an examiners duty to go to a meeting regarding the film they viewed and there they would talk about how they should rate it. There a few more duties that each examiner has, and every examiner has to do them.

The actual examination of the films is a simple process, first the film is viewed in pairs. Though apparently there are some occasions where the film will be viewed alone or with more than two people. This is to make sure that it isn’t just your subjective opinion on what’s appropriate and not. Usually the viewing lasts over five hours a day. Later the viewers sit down and review each other’s notes of the film and compile it into an examiners log.

A nice, clean, simple process for viewing the films.

After John got all the duties and stuff out of the way we started watching clips of video and he asked us how we would rate these if we were working for the BBFC. 

The first clip he showed us was a Disney short film where a young man was tumbling around inside a washing machine. John made a comment about how the film that they were assessing did not get a U rating because of the short film at the start of it. He made a comment about how this stunt could be imitate able by young children and how the parents in the clip saw this all as a joke, therefore encouraging kids to do it.

I can understand that.

Later on he showed us a clip of a British film where a woman was savagely beaten into her car where a man was shouting an offensive word starting with the letter C. He told us that he’d rate that film an 18. This was because he said that any film with visible violence and vile language that was used as an attack could only be rated 18 or be inappropriate to begin with.

When we watched a clip of The Dark Knight John said they rated the film 12A and then got a lot of bother for it, however then he pointed out that there is no actual violence shown on screen, it was all implied and there was not even any blood when people got shot. So that was appropriate. 

When put in contrast to the other clip that was rated 18, which made a lot of sense. Although I think that The Dark Knight should have been a 15 because of other violent moments in the film, such as two-faces’ second face which is literally just muscle tissue, and a hospital being blown up. But that’s just me.

Later John started talking about how they would rate games.

He began by saying that they played the games with all the cheats, they had access to all the levels and content so they could give the game a fair rating, while taking everything the game has into consideration.

The exam process for the game is largely similar except there are other things that the board has to take into consideration.

During a game examination they have to take into consideration the appropriateness of the weapons in the game, if there are weapons. Take notice of all the nudity in the game, what kind of criminal activities there might be, whether there are drugs in it or not, the violence and vile language. All those sorts of things, however since it’s a game they have to take a look at how all those things are used to either enhance the experience of the game or if they’re just there to be disturbing.

Manhunt was a game that was deemed too violent for release into the public because of the various and inappropriate ways to kill people.

The other things that they take into consideration while assessing games is the art style that the game uses, the moral values of the game whatever they could be and a wide range of other things.

In all I enjoyed sitting in on this lecture, it was good fun watching all the videos and I had a moment where I ducked my head in shame when I could recognise the Japanese anime cartoon the man started showing.