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

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.