BBFC Seminar

On Wednesday 9th March in the afternoon, one of the commissioners from the BBFC came in to school to give us a talk about the BBFC, what they do and the process they go through to classify films.  Although we knew a lot about the BBFC guidelines already, it was very interesting to hear from someone who works there about the different guidelines at each age category.  It was also very interesting to hear about a typical day at the BBFC office, they have to watch 5 and a half hours of works ranging from kids cartoons to porn.  It was fun looking through all the different case studies and debating what we would rate the film and then hearing from her what the film was actually classified as and why.  I also learnt that in order to classify games they have to sit there and play them, 8 of the 15 commissioners play the games but they are given ‘cheats’ and ‘god-modes’ to help get them through the game quickly, although from now on the BBFC won’t classify games which was disappointing for them.  It was interesting when she talked about how the BBFC had classified some films wrong, eg. ‘Juno’ they classified to low at a 15 and ‘Dark Knight’ they classified too low at ‘12A’ and they only realised by the amount of complaints.  We learnt that the chief commissioner can overrule all the other commissioners and change the rating if they feel its wrong.  Overall, I learnt a lot about the BBFC from the talk and I’ll find the information very useful.