COMP 3: Regulation

A Level Media Studies

This blog post outlines how our music video project was regulated. This blog is written by me (Sharon).

Before we created a music video, we had some rules to follow, which can be seen as a form of regulation or censorship. From Cambridge, we were instructed to choose songs in English or add English subtitles to non-English songs. Avoiding topics on drug use, harmful substances and content, and suicide. Concerns about vehicle safety were advised against.

From the school and our teacher, we must have appropriate content as we go to a conservative school, such as bad language, no explicit songs, and no violence. As our music video will be showcased in school, we are required to ensure the content is age-appropriate since our school consists of students ages 13-18.

We used the British rating system as a guide for how we would create our music video. This system is broken into 5 categories, ranging from all audience ages to adults working for licensed premises only. As we still wanted to target children and ages above, we must ensure our music video would be classified as PG since the music we chose, "Feather" by Sabrina Carpenter, includes swear words. As I was having difficulties in finding the official rating system in Indonesia, I have therefore chosen to use the British rating system.

Note: The permission email was written and sent by Maxi.

To prevent copyright restrictions, we chose to be safe and avoid any further issues, such as in YouTube by sending out a permission email to Universal Music Group (Sabrina Carpenter's music label). This blog post discusses this further.

As we were advised against the car, we did a risk assessment of the usage of cars. This blog post discusses our risk assessment further.

Self Reflection: Applying these regulations to our project really helped my group to prevent any further causes and/or harms that could affect our project as a whole. Such that we knew not to include any harmful objects, or inappropriate scenes when planning the scenes via the storyboard, screenplay, and filming itself. This prevented us from delaying the filming process by possibly planning the scenes all over again if we included scenes that we should not (as mentioned before). I learned that this planning is highly crucial to keep this project on track and avoid any further harm, for instance, by the school restraining our music video from being showcased, or perhaps YouTube taking down the video due to inappropriate scenes and/or harmful objects shown in our music video.

When discussing issue of regulation, the topic of free speech is often mentioned. I do not feel that my freedom of speech was limited due to these restrictions. We were still able to do most of the things we set out to accomplish, and the regulations actually provided a safer experience for all those involved in the shooting (eg. car scene)