Here's Alex (left) and Kat (right)
Research was essential to this short film. My project partner, Corina, and I began by researching genre, we knew right away that we wanted to make comedy with romantic aspects. We researched comedy with a combination of movies and shows, using six in total. In this blog post the two strongest examples are provided:
Bottoms specifically follows two best friends who start a fight club to date their crushes, seeing this dynamic between the best friends was extremely helpful and helped fuel Corina and I's understanding of how two characters in a comedy movie can interact with each other. Though Kat and Cat's dynamic is different then the protagonists in Bottoms, it introduced us to something very important to have in a comedy: comedic timing.
We found this article speaking about how important comedic timing is when making a comedy. It can make or break a joke. We learnt that it's all about instinct, especially in long take, and we have a few of those in this piece. Corina and I tried our best to have the best comedic timing we could since we are in the film. We are certainly not the best actors, but we have both taken drama and acting classes in the past, which helped with this timing immensely.
Understanding our target audience was important so that we could properly market and represent our audience. Our target audience are people ages 14 to 20, mostly women (but all genders can enjoy of course), may be a part of the lgbtq+ or an ally of the lgbtq+, and enjoy comedy as well as romance. We wanted the marketing of the film to be colorful as it catches the attention of younger audiences with bright colors and goes with our name fruit punch which represents a mix of emotions. To interact with our audience we used instagram, which we tried to make as colorful and eye catching as possible.
This is section of our instagram and what it looked like
Something we lacked in our social media was reels, we had thought of posting reels with short, but capturing scenes from our film since our target audience (teenagers and young adults) use the reels feature on Instagram and love the instant gratification that comes along with scrolling through videos. Not adding short clips was a missed opportunity for sure and could have expended as well as resonated with our audience. Our postcard was also similar to our color scheme in our instagram, making it consecutive, here's what the post card looked like:
We also used those same fruit in the logo which we made by scanning fruit stickers and by using Canva. This is what our logo looked like:
As you can tell, these fruits were a big part of our branding, we wanted people to see them and recognize that it was from fruit punch right away. We also used the fruits in the film when explaining the steps to get Alex, this allowed the audience to see these fruits and recognize the short film, here is what one of the steps looked like:
A missed opportunity however is not making a Tik Tok, according to this article 63% of 13 to 17 year olds use Tik Tok whereas 59% use Instagram. Though both are popular, Tik Tok has an algorithm which catches onto audiences interest extremely quickly so also using it along with Instagram would have been a great decision. We also most definitely needed more audience interaction. We didn't post polls on Instragram, which would have been a good way to talk our audience and create a sense of closeness and connection between the audience and the brand of fruit punch. There was a bit of audience interaction in the comment sections however for instance here:
here's some comments we got on a post because we asked this question
the question being "What's your answer??!!!"
Something we really prioritized was properly representing the lgbtq+ community. Often, lgbtq+ stories are about sad topics and majority of the times it is because the characters are gay. In this blog post, I discussed this article from The Guardian:
Benjamin Lee essentially discusses that although it's important to see the bad things that happen to queer people, it is just as equally important to see queer love and happy endings in media. There's a lot of funny and romantic heterosexual movies with happy endings, but the there's only a handful of those for queer people. This article gave an example of this which is Happiest Season (2020) was promoted to be a fun movie about two lesbians who enjoy a holiday together, but instead the movie ended up being about one of the characters not being out to her family and the other being uncomfortable with that, making it a sad movie rather than a happy one.
We represented Kat and Alex as a lesbian couple without only making their character about them being queer, they're just two girls who love each other. We also wanted to of course give them a happy ending, and they ended up going to homecoming together, so it worked out. We also would've liked to represent other members of the community like bisexuals, gay men, and more, but with the length of our short film, adding more characters might have made it a bit confusing.
A big reason our characters were in high school was also for representation reasons, as discussed previously, we don't see many teenage movies with lgbtq+ representation, and if they represented, harmful stereotypes are used or they're side characters. We wanted Alex and Kat to be the protagonists and we wanted to be very careful to not harmfully represent them and provide representation for lgbtq+ people we rarely get.
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