What is the Zenith project?
The Zenith Project was our final freestyle project. It is meant to be the peak of our freestyle abilities, and represents everything we have learned. The project consists of either working individually, or in a group, to make a project of your choice, as long as it involves skills we have learned at freestyle. For my project, I decided to make a video covering the historical influences of the film industry, from region to region. I decided to make this because I have always liked doing research style projects, and history as well as geography have always been interesting to me. Paired with film, I was able to create something that involved all of these topics.
This project was a risk for me because I was working individually, and using a program (Premier Pro) which I didn’t have a lot of experience with, at least in this context. The whole process was a new experience for me, because it was my first time making a project with this much freedom, mainly because the order of imagery, and audio was an open space that I had to decide on my own, and since I was doing this project by myself, I didn’t have as much peer review, so I had to hope that my audience would understand what I was trying to convey. All in all, I learned a lot during this project, especially about self-direction.
The actual process for my Zenith was the following:
- Creating a calendar, so that I could have check in dates with my elective teacher, Mr. Taylor.
- Deciding on a format/order for my actual video.
- Conducting my research, since I had to have a clear understanding of everything I would talk about in my video. This involved researching the backgrounds of directors and companies, as well as watching films that had a notable influence in the industry.
- Writing a script for my video, because I was going to have visuals on screen with a personal voice over.
- Gathering imagery and music for my video, this included video clips and pictures.
- Recording my audio for the voice over.
- Putting it all together in Premier Pro and exporting.
Below is my research document as well as my format plan.
And here is my Zenith script.
These are screenshots of my production process. My completed premier pro timeline, and my downloads file which had most of my imagery.
Finally, my completed video:
My Reflections
All in all, I’m very happy with how my project turned out. I took some risks by working with something that I had little to no experience with, and I had to trust that I would be able to make the right decisions, since I was working basically self-guided. I had a lot of fun making my Zenith and I learned a lot of skills from it that I can and will apply in the future.