Introduction
The Zenith Project is supposed to be the peak of all Freestyle Skills. When going about deciding what I was going to do I reflected a lot on the last couple years, all the projects I liked and all the projects I didn’t like. After reflecting I realized that I really like working on film aesthetics. So, I decided to do Set Design. How I went about this project was I dreamt up 4 characters and then designed their living spaces. The characters I settled on were 1) A frat boys bedroom 2) A middle school girls room 3) A middle aged alcoholics living room and 4) An 1800s dining room (did this as a vision board). Then I sourced all of the materials I needed and set up the set in my grandma’s empty room.
The process
Sourcing!
Final Product!
Reflection
Zenith is supposed to be the peak of all your Freestyle skills, this is what Mr. Taylor said when he introduced the project. Over the past two years at Freestyle, I have done a lot of projects that I have really loved and a lot of projects that I haven’t. I have also learned many different skills, some that I like more than others. I have loved being in Film and I have really gotten to learn what I love about Film, I love the aesthetics of film, and last year I did my explorations project on Makeup and hair in the film industry and I loved that project and so I wanted to get more into the aesthetics of Film but something completely different. A week before the project was introduced, I watched my favorite movie Lady Bird and while watching that movie I took notice of her room in the film and how well-designed it was, it fit her character perfectly. So when Mr. Taylor introduced the project immediately. I knew I wanted to do set design. The way I set up the project was first I had to come up with four characters and I would design those four characters’ living spaces. The characters I decided to do were: a middle-aged alcoholics den, two: a middle school girl’s room, three: a frat boy’s room, and four: an 1800s rich family dining room, and for the last one, I did it online. The first thing that I had to do to design these rooms was to source all the items I would use to put in the rooms, so to do that I went to Goodwill, I borrowed from my friends and family and I had people I knew who were good at making things, make props that I needed. The second step of the process was setting everything up in the room, which proved to be harder than I thought. I made the mistake of not going into the room before sourcing all of the stuff I needed so when I went into the room for the first time I realized that the space was a lot bigger than I anticipated and I had not really sourced enough stuff to fill the whole room, so I had to make do with what I had and try to use the things I had to expand the space. After, I set up the space where I took a lot of photos and then I would look at the photos and move things around accordingly to see what looks the best. Some big lessons that I have learned from this project are one: how important the sourcing of items for the set is, I kind of glazed over this step, and I realized that when designing a set you should always get more items than you need to, so that when some items don’t work you have a lot more to fill up the space. Another lesson I learned was the importance of Budgeting, even when I went to thrift shops to find what I wanted, the money started adding up pretty quickly, and I realized a little more research in the beginning is important so that I would’ve known exactly what I wanted and exactly how much everything would be so I could act accordingly. The last big lesson I learned was the importance of getting into the head of the character that’s space I was designing, you really need to get in their head and think about the things they would like and their personalities, to make a successful room. Overall, I had a really fun time with this project but if I could go back I would challenge myself to put more time into the sourcing of the items for my room and more time into setting up the rooms. I learned through this project how cool set design is and how I may potentially want to do it in the future.