LO2 Legal and Ethical Report

For our music video, we would need to consider legal and ethical issues for the safety of our audience viewing the music video and the team making the music video. This would include the legal aspects of health and safety, copyright and ownership, consent and other contracts and media regulation. In relation to our music video, health and safety would cover the production crew when filming around the equipment and for the actors when on location. Whereas copyright and ownership would cover giving credits to the artist of the song and giving any profit made to her to avoid being sued. The consent forms would also cover being sued if the actors were underage and didn't have their guardian's permission for example. Our music video would be regulated by OFCOM, so it would need to follow their guidelines and be appropriate for viewing, such as no violent imagery or strong language. If the concept of the music video requires violence or the song includes swearing with the artist mouthing the words, and if they are showing the music video on a music TV channel before the 9pm watershed they would need to show an edited version of their mouth blurred or the violent or sexual scenes are cut out to avoid causing any offence. Ethical issues which are required to be considered in producing, distributing and viewing our music view would be any depiction of violence or sexual imagery, stereotypes and representation of minority groups,  and product placement. They need to be considered because of Stuart Halls' theory of the encoding and decoding model. This states how people's upbringing can affect their viewing of different points in the video. We would want the video to be easy for the audience to understand the preferred meaning and that they agree with the dominant viewpoint without causing any offence.