This blogpost, written by me (Maxi), details the ways in which we have chosen to, or have been forced to regulate our music video in accordance to different restrictions from various entities.
Regulation is a common occurrence in the media world, and is a key portion of the Media Studies syllabus. In the creation of our music video, we also had to conform to the standards and expectations of our projects regulators, which in this case would be Cambridge and our own school.
Cambridge outlined a few regulations in notes that were given to our teacher Mr. Nick, which stated that students should not be including dangerous activities that promote harm, or could be harmful to film. This include violence, drugs, or other dangerous activities. We had to follow these regulations, and made sure that all scenes in our music videos did not promote dangerous activity. The only scene that could possibly be considered dangerous would most likely be the scenes in which KIARA is seen driving her car with her friends. This was however done very cautiously at speeds that do not endanger the cast or the team. Previously before filming too, we had safety evaluations as well, and planned out how to make the filming of these scenes as safe as possible. Overall, we did not feel that this impaired the creation process of our music video, as our ideas from the start with the song we had chosen did not have any implications of violence, and thus did not require these types of imagery to be present in our music video.
Next, regulations from our own school also apply, since it after all is a school project and should thus be school appropriate. This meant that we were not allowed to show our characters/cast swearing in the video, with the exception of the lyrics of the song itself, which did include swear words. This however was not seen as a problem though, since that itself was a part of the song, and not something our characters went out of their way to explicitly say. Furthermore, violence was also prohibited by our teacher, as we were told our music video would be played in front of the whole school, and thus had to consider what would be appropriate for audiences as young as the age of 11. This didn't affect us that much though, as we did not intend to have violent acts in our video.
Lastly, general cultural conventions in music videos, including those in Asian demographics, rarely include images of nudity/sexualisation of characters, since it is quite a taboo subject for many Asian audiences. This didn't really effect our music video either though, as we did not intend, and had no need to use nudity or sexually explicit imagery in any of our scenes, since it was not what the way we wanted to portray our characters, and was not a necessary element of the plot/story that we wanted our music video to have.
Overall, we wanted our music video to have a PG rating, as that would make it appropriate for all students in our school, thus based on the research we conducted on ratings of films/shows in the UK (according to the British Board of Film Classification's website), we saw that a PG rating meant mild bad language was allowed, as long as it is not frequently repeated, along with other guidelines such as not including violence, discriminatory and dangerous behaviour, etc. We thus followed these guidelines well, only including mild swear words, as well as not having our characters take part in actions that promote dangerous activity. Thus, we believe that we would indeed achieve our goal and receive a PG rating for our music video.
Reflection:
Although regulation plays a large part in the decision making process of producers trying to create any form of media texts, we feel that the regulations we had to follow did not effect the creation process of our music video. We were still able to effectively tell our story in the way we wanted it to, and were not required to make any significant changes to our music video due to the regulations placed upon us. Thus, we believe it was quite easy to follow said regulations, however it was most likely due to us not intending/needing to have elements in our video which would need to be regulated in the first place.
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