Fruit Punch: My Critical Reflection

Fruit Punch, a short film by Corina Pelayo and Corina Figuera, focuses on a coming of age queer relationship in a comedic light. It follows the main character Kat and her crush on a fellow classmate Alex. It takes us through 6 different steps of Kat's crush with her childhood best friend, Cat, along her side helping her get closer to her crush. This short film is definitely a romantic comedy. It focuses on the two main characters falling in love with some underlying chaotic tones that make it feel more real and relatable to the audience. The friendship shown between Kat and Cat is based off my relationship with my closest friend and my project partner. It shows how romantic relationships can be supported by your friendships without any conflict or jealousy that could patronize those long lasting friendships. Our short film doesn’t directly focus on social issues or try to make a huge statement. We decided that we didn’t want that early into creating this film. We wanted to create a fun, comedy short film about a queer relationship in a positive light since we noticed that a lot of queer stories in movies and TV always have something heavy or sad conflict tied into them and while those stories are definitely important, they’re not the only kind of queer stories that should exist. We wanted to make something fun and lighthearted and no heavy storyline about their sexuality. Because queer people should be included in these fun stories too. Showing that LGBTQ+ relationships are normalized without having to explain or defend them was also something we wanted to include in our film. In media we typically see that queer love has be a struggle so we decided to shift the narrative of them being queer to Kat just having a crush and pursuing her. 

Our projects branding was through visual style, a film festival postcard and our social media presence. One of the first things we came up with was the title, fruit punch, when I thought about how we could visual represent our title and short film I decided to use these stickers that I had of cut outs of different types of fruit. I scanned them and my partner made our logo. When making the visuals for the steps of Kats crush, I decided to use these fruits again so they can become recognizable and be a staple piece of our short film that also matches with our style and title. I made six graphics for six steps, all with different fruits I scanned. The step graphics with different kinds of fruits can help audiences associate these specific kinds of fruit to a different part of the film and feel more engaged with Kat's story.

Example of the final step graphic I created:

These fruits also came into play when we started posting on social media which we gave a simple and easy to find username, @fruitpunchfilm. We posted these different fruits and stills from the short film to create a very stylish feed on our social media layout. We captioned these posts with little phrases that related to what was happening in the stills taken from the short film being posted and every caption included the hashtag: #FruitPunch. I feel like we could've approached it a bit different by using other popular platforms instead of just sticking to one social media application. One social media app that would have benefitted us would have been TikTok. TikTok is one of the biggest social media apps in America especially when it comes to queer teens. I feel like expanding to a different social media platform could've help grow our audience and expose our short film to many others. Another aspect of social media that we could've done differently is being more interactive on our page with our audience by posting polls and daily stories to keep our followers interested.

We also decided to include these fruits in our film festival postcard so I designed the front of the postcard with a still from the short film and made the backdrop between the two main characters a bunch of the fruits I scanned. These fruit designs help our audience engage with our short film because of the fun style/colors and its an easy visual to remember and makes them tie something so normal a fruit to our project. Since we were so consistent with these fruits it made our style and branding cohesive. My partner designed the other side of the film festival postcard. She added the date of the film screening, the time it starts, the location, our social media page and where you can watch it. Having all this info on the back of this postcard gives the audience information on where and how to find our film if they are interested on the first look. 

The target audience for Fruit Punch is mostly people between the ages of fourteen to twenty. We wanted to make something for people in that age group because we know what it’s like to be that age. We wanted to make it as real and relatable as possible so we can attract more people. All genders can relate to the story, but we think it might speak the most to queer girls that enjoy queer media and queer stories. The people who watch coming of age films and movies or TV shows about queer characters and identities. We want this film to be for anyone who wants to enjoy a fun romantic comedy.  

When it came to researching for my project, I knew I wanted to stick between two genres: comedy and romance. Two major pieces of media that helped me throughout this creative process were: Bottoms (2023) and But I'm A Cheerleader (1999). 

Bottoms is a comedy directed by Emma Seligman was a huge inspiration for our short film. It mixes humor with romance and strong friendship and that really stood out to us and obviously inspired us. We loved how the main characters, Josie and PJ, are funny and relatable at the same time. That energy was the kind we wanted to bring into our characters Kat and Cat. Even though Bottoms is a comedy, the whole point of the story is driven by crushes, which is something we kept in mind while writing our short film.  But Im a Cheerleader directed by Jamie Babbit, really inspired our film with how much we loved the graphics of this film really stood out to us and we definitely kept that similar style in mind when creating our short film. We also loved how the romance between Megan and Graham is soft and sweet which was definitely the dynamic we wanted for Kat and Alex. These films taught me and my partner lots about he genre we wanted to contribute to and helped us do it properly.