The students conducted a focus group on Facebook to get audience feedback on their short film "Finding Mrs Simon". The feedback indicated that the film followed conventions of the romance-comedy genre, particularly through the main character Simon who fit genre stereotypes. However, the film could have been shorter. Overall, the feedback showed the film successfully used conventions like storyline and characters to be comedic while also showing the romance of the narrative.

1. Morgan Clough, Olivia Lyons and Amy Longworth
Media Evaluation
Question 3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?
When creating our audience feedback for our short film ‘Finding Mrs Simon’ we decided to carry out a focus
group on Facebook where we added media students to the group to watch the film that we embedded onto
YouTube. We asked them to comment on the film giving us feedback on the positive aspects of the film,
negative aspects, overall conclusions on the film and a general list of improvements which could be made to
possibly improve the film.
We asked the focus group if our film followed conventions of a romance-comedy film, or whether it challenged
the conventions of a romance-comedy film. The feedback we got from this was that it followed conventions of
a romance-comedy because of the main character we used in the film, Simon, the feedback that we received
was that he followed the stereotype of a character in a romance-comedy genre which overall makes the film a
comedy. This backs up our own evaluation of the product where we have stated that our film follows Daniel
Chandler’s conventions. This also shows that we have used audience theories when creating our film, we
wanted to include conventions of a romance-comedy film and encode them into our film, this uses Hall’s
encoding and decoding theory because we present conventions of a rom-com into our film e.g. the storyline,
Simon (the main character) and they are positively decoded by the audience because the film includes
conventions of the genre.
Overall the positive feedback we produced from our audience feedback was:
- Our film followed conventions of a Romance-Comedy film which was received positively by the
audience.
- The main character, Simon was a good choice of character. Also using conventions of the chosen
genre, this helped make the film comical.
- The narrative of the story.
We also asked the focus group for Negative points on our film which would help us create improvements to
make our film better. The feedback we created for this was that the film could have been shorter, some of the
feedback we had was that the film was too long for a Short film. Although we do agree with this feedback and
we have taken it on board, we was unable to change the time of the film due to time difficulties as we was
coming to the end of creating our Advanced Portfolio. So we were unable to change or edit the film.
Conclusions we made coming from the feedback of the film was that we encoded conventions of a romance-
comedy into our film successfully as the audience feedback told us that the
characters used in the film made the film comical, and the narrative of the
film showed the romance when Simon finally got his girl. We believe we
encoded the conventions of a romance-comedy well into the film because
we have compared our film to other films that are similar, and we think it
is a successful short film.
A list of improvements we have created from our audience feedback is
that our film could have been more successful if the film was shorter. But

2. we are taking this as a positive improvement because we are unable to do this but if we had more time on our
coursework we would fully take this on board and change the time length of the film.
Our own conclusion from the film is that we think the conventions of a romance-comedy are used throughout
the film but we also think we have challenged conventions of a romance-comedy which makes it more
interesting to watch for an audience.