Zenith

Introduction

The Zenith project is the final project that Freestyle students do, and represents the culmination of our two years of hard work and growth. For my Zenith project, I was inspired to explore my growing passion for found-footage horror through creating a video diary of a student filmmaker named Akhand who is making a cheesy, campy, 80s horror short. The video diary documented Akhand producing the film, from talking with actors, to making costumes, to actually shooting it. Over the course of the video diary, Akhand begins to take the project a little too seriously.

For the project, I worked with four actors. The raw “found footage” style of filming gave me the opportunity to really focus on everybody’s acting. I made sure to explain every small detail I wanted included in the performances, and had a great time connecting these details to how the characters changed throughout the story. Focusing on the story became my focus for this project. Over these past two years, Mr. Taylor, my film teacher, has stressed the importance of the story to any film, telling us that “story is king.” This project has helped me focus and further improve my favorite part of creating art, which is developing stories.

I also discovered a new focus I’m interested in during this project: developing characters. I loved thinking about each character’s wants and motivations, and how they would react to different events occurring in the story. It was also interesting to think about how one mannerism would carry over across situations. For example, I established one of the characters as being very passive toward the start of the film. Later on, however, he turns this passiveness into disdain, and is the driving force behind wanting to quit the horror film.

Creating this Zenith has inspired me to continue making found-footage horror films. I’m already planning several over the summer—the great thing about found footage is that I can shoot and edit a 10-minute movie in just a week or two, so I can keep on making them!

Process

Final Product

This is my Zenith “Celebration”, which is what we watched in class. It’s meant to be a showcase of your project; however, I was able to fit my film into it as well. The “introduction” of this video is my Zenith presentation. I decided to stay in character for the presentation, so watch out for the story queues in my performance!

Reflection

Here is my Zenith reflection. You can hear me talk about some of my inspirations for the film!