Task 3- Laws of the animation sector

Legal and Ethical Considerations

There are many different laws and ethical considerations to be wary of when producing films, adverts, articles and television programmers. When creating my Final Major Project, an animation about a write of passage, there will be some laws that I will have to consider before showing the finished product publically.

The laws that can effect productions are:

•   Social issues and sensitivities- Being delicate towards current social issues
• ·         Representation of gender- Representing both genders equally and fairly
• ·         Representation of religious beliefs-Fairly and factually representing religion and it’s beliefs.
• ·         Linguistic usages-The translation of different languages
• ·         Accessibility-Making your film accessible to the widest audience regardless of technology or ability.
• ·         Professional body codes of practice- e.g. BBC producers guidelines
• ·         Worldwide Web Consortium accessibility standards-Making web content accessible to the disabled.
• ·         Broadcasting act 1990-Preventing ownership in tv and radio being in too few hands.
• ·         Official secrets act 1989-Protecting official information.
• ·         Obscene publications Act 1959-Restricting content that may be offensive to audiences.
• ·         Films act 1985-
• ·         Video Recordings Act 1984-Regulating the distribution of video recordings
• ·         Race Relations Act 1976-To respect and not discriminate people of different racial groups.
• ·         Human rights act 1998-Enable people to their rights and freedoms
• ·         Licensing Act 2003-Not influencing the sale or use of alcohol, drugs or cigarettes.
• ·         Privacy Law-Regulates collection of people’s personal information
• ·         Copyright and intellectual property law-Protecting people’s work from being copied without permission.
• ·         Libel law-Making a statement that may be shown to give a negative image to a business/group/indivudial etc (slander)

I have highlighted from the list laws that we will have to consider when producing our animation and making it available for the public to watch. I will be explaining why each of these could affect my work by using examples (with animations where possible).

The first is representation of gender, how both sexes are represented. In the story, there is a girl and a boy who grow up together, go travelling leading separate lives, find each other again and marry. Although I don’t think that this would have too much of an impact on our production, it could be seen that the woman and man are treated unequally. The man goes to university, where he gets an education and instead, the woman goes travelling the world, which the man also does after he finishes university.  

In the media, adverts are often banned for being sexist towards women, especially in the 1960’s, when woman were seen as housewives and of a much lower status than men. The picture on the right shows an advert for Volkswagen cars, with the car all smashed up. The writing at the bottom explains how cheap the parts are for their cars and says when your wife crashes your car ‘It may make you furious, but it won’t make you poor’.

Now showing an example of a cartoon, (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aTjof5fqQo) this was first shown in the 1950’s, but replayed on Cartoon Network. It would have been a humorous cartoon at the time about different style cars and what they’re good for. In this era, women were constantly told they were bad drivers, and this reflects in the animation. Throughout the cartoon there are a few sexist comments, including having a moving garage so your wife can’t crash into it, women being bad at indicating signals and having a bra and cleavage decoration on the front of the car ‘revealing almost the entire fan’.

Nowadays, these comments wouldn’t be acceptable because of the Representation of Gender act, meaning that a gender cannot be shown to be lower than the other. As our animation has no talking, there definitely can’t be any verbal sexist comments (not that there would be). The thing that my group felt would possibly affect our animation with this law was as I said, showing the man being able to get an education and traveling and the woman goes travelling.

The next act that our animation may be in breach of if viewed by the public is Accessibility. This is when you must make your publication easy to access and obtain to the disabled or elderly. The reason why I think that our animation may not be easily accessible is because there is no speech, although there are a few sound effects and music to set the atmosphere and scene. Although I couldn’t find any examples of a breach of this law in the film or animation sectors, comparison websites have been under threat because they didn’t comply with the law. Organisers of the charity AbilityNet say that Confused.com Comparethemarket.com, Gocompare.com and Kelko.com are ignoring the basic guidelines and websites are not easily navigated for the disabled. "The law is clear on this issue. It is just as illegal to bar disabled visitors from accessing your goods and services online as it would be to keep them out of your shop in the 'real world' ", said Robin Christopherson, head of digital inclusion at AbilityNet, who is himself blind. [the Guardian].

The Race Relations act (1976) is another thing that I feel I should touch on with our animation. The reason being that one of our characters is black and one is white and in some scenes (such as at school and in exams) the other characters are multi-coloured such as orange, green, blue etc. We felt that these scenes may be perceived in the wrong way and seen to be racist. However, we wanted to make our characters different colours to the others to be able to distinguish them, and felt it would be easier this was as they have no voices. One Betty Boop episode was banned in the early 40’s/50’s from TV because it contained racial assumptions and stereotypes. The cartoon shows a baby contest from babies all around the world, and Betty Boop makes comments and judges throughout. There are three black babies which are introduced by Betty Boop as the ‘colourful three’. When you see them on screen, their appearance isn’t the same as any of the rest of the white characters, and their faces resemble those of the banned racist dolls ‘golliwogs’. The babies then start crying and are stopped by being given watermelon- another racial representation.

The last law we would have to take into consideration if we were to publically show our animation would be the copyright of the music. The copyright law protects:

·         Literary works- novels, song lyrics, articles etc

·         Dramatic works- dance and mime

·         Musical Works

·         Artistic Works- paintings, engravings, maps, logos etc

·         Layouts- typographical arrangements used to publish a book for example.

·         Recordings- sound and film

·         Broadcasts of a work.

The copyright law protects any work, and any work you create is automatically protected. With students producing work, as I am with my final major project, if something successful were to become of the work, college will own the copyright of my work and would be entitled to any money gained from it. If somebody dies, their work is no longer copyrighted after 50 years, unless somebody else buys or owns the copyright of their work. Having copyright of your work stops others legally being able to copy it or use it without your permission. If the fact that you have automatic copyright does not stop somebody from exploiting your material, then as the creator of the work, you have the right to take legal action.

Looking at all the different legal and ethical considerations that would apply to my film, I found it hard to be able to determine which ones would apply. The ones you automatically think of is showing alcohol and sex, but we show neither of these. Also, because we produced an animation with no speech or facial expressions or features, I think that it is harder to breech the laws.