What a PIF is not:
- An advertisement: You may think of them as "road safety ads" or something like that, but technically, they're not. They are produced on behalf of the government, and they're not trying to sell you anything.
- Charity appeals are not PIFs either. PIFs do not promote the work of a particular charity or ask for donations, although some charities make bloody good awareness campaigns (I point you in the direction of the NSPCC's "Full Stop" advertising: http://www.nspcc.org.uk/whatwedo/mediacentre/nspccadverts/campaignads_wda33415.html) which could almost be considered as "honourary" PIFs. I'll write about those another time.
- They're not actual schools films, eg. "Words and Pictures" and the like, which are not made by the COI and are designed to help teach children the National Curriculum.
They are known as Public Service Announcements, or PSAs, in the USA and many of those can be seen at http://www.adcouncil.org. Wikipedia has a more definitive article on PIFs as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_information_film
I don't have the copyright to upload PIFs to this site, but you can find some if you run a search on YouTube.com. There are also two "Charley Says" DVD collections of public information films on general release, available from good shops and websites like http://www.amazon.co.uk and http://www.play.com, and some PIFs available to view at the following sites:
http://www.tmf.ecwhost.com/extra/pifs.htm
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/films/default.htm
http://625.uk.com/pifs/intro.htm
On the bright side, I'm hoping the Film Images company, which owns most of the COI's archive footage from before 2000 or so, will let me view some of their films for private research for this site. Stay tuned.
2 comments:
Actually, these days they are produced by advertising agencies, but agencies comissioned by and under contract from the the government, so you're still right.
To be edited! Thank you.
Post a Comment