BBFC Black Card Generator

The BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) is independent and not for profit. It helps everyone in the UK, especially children and families, choose age-appropriate films, videos and websites. As well as rating films for cinemas, DVD and Blu-ray, it rates video on demand and music videos online, and helps mobile operators set parental controls at the right level.

Since the early days of cinema, the BBFC has shown its age ratings on the famous Black Cards. If you have been to a UK cinema, you have seen one: the card on screen before the film, with the rating (PG, 18 and so on) and a short note about what to expect, which the BBFC calls ratings info.

The BBFC asked IceBubble to build an online tool to generate these Black Cards, for its own teams and for distribution, replacing the solution they had.

The challenge

The tool needed to take what a user typed and selected on a web page, such as the film title and the age rating, and merge it with existing templates to produce a unique Black Card.

It had to run online, hosted in Amazon Web Services, and follow the existing process, which used Microsoft Excel and a PHP website. That process could not produce large numbers of cards at once, and its code was no longer supported in house.

Demand was growing, so the team also needed to create many cards quickly: bulk upload of requests, and a download of all the finished cards in one zip file.

What we built

Using the existing solution as the reference, we reproduced its results exactly in Microsoft .NET and SQL Server, hosted in Amazon Web Services as planned.

We added user management, bulk upload of up to 1,000 requests at a time, and a zip download of the finished cards.

Working with Ian and the Central Services team at the BBFC, we made sure every card was an exact match for the old output. Fonts and image sizes were checked closely, and the teams who use it were happy with the result.

The result

The BBFC got the Black Card Generator it specified, delivered on time and within budget.

Ian and his colleagues could review progress throughout on our development environment, and we kept them up to date with testing as the build went on.

The generator cuts the time it takes to produce Black Cards and lets the team handle far more of them, saving time and money. The BBFC runs it on its intranet for internal teams.