Unit 3 - M2

Omniya Tajni

M2: Legal and ethical issues are identified and resolved for the planned productions

There are many legal and ethical issues that need to be identified and resolved while planning for the production of any audio-visual product. We identified quite a few while planning and needed to consider this before the production of our TV Drama.

A day before our shooting, my team made sure that we made consent forms for our actors to sign before we recorded them in front of a camera. This is needed as is considered as an ethical issue/legal issue if it isn’t done, because if we didn’t get the consent from the actors then it would lead to a disruption in to the distribution of our teaser scene for our TV drama, because the actors will have that authority to not allow us to distribute any of the footage they are in, because they didn’t give us their consent what so ever. This is why we made sure we got their consent and explained to them that this will be distributed and asked them if they were okay with this. Although we got their signature already, we just needed to ask and explain to them what they are signing for just in case they didn’t know beforehand. 

Due to the fact that our title sequence will be mainly shot on a green screen, while planning for the production we realised that we would need images to replace the green screen and make it look realistic in order to fit the brief requirements. We came to a decision that when we decide to add background images to our green screen footage, that we find stock images only that will go with the shots we took, but we need to make sure that the images we find and decide to use are royalty copyright free. The reason for this is because if the image is copyrighted and we are going to distribute our product, the owner of the stock image could come across our product and realise that we use their image, without their permission and will have the right to report it and get our work deleted. Finding royalty free images is a better decision because at least then we have the right to use it and will not require anyone reporting it as it will be open and applicable for anyone to use due to it being royalty free.

After planning for our product, we believed that under the BBFC rating it would be under the 12 classification as we didn’t intend to include any promotions of dangerous behaviour which children are likely to copy, strong language, disturbing threat and horror scenes and only some moderate violence but that was included in our title sequence, which was an explosion as asked for in the client brief. The reason why it was compulsory for us to follow the rating we gave it and meet up to its expectations was because if audiences between the ages 12-14 were to watch this their parents would expect it to not be too extreme and applicable for their children to watch, if their parents were unhappy with the images included and didn’t believe it should be rated a 12, then it would lead us to have a legal issue which would lead us to remove it completely. This is why we needed to be careful about the content we decide to include and discuss and come to a decision on whether it would be suitable to be rated as 12.

Legal and ethical issues are very important when it comes to planning for a product, and it is expected to identify them and solve them before the creation and distribution, otherwise it could lead to serious disruption.