Introduction
If you made it this far into my website, congrats. This is the project I got to do at Freestyle, marking the final moments of my Senior year. Now, you may be wondering,
what is the Zenith Project?
Well, let me tell you;
Zenith at freestyle is a project designed to challenge Seniors to make something from passion using what they’ve learned and experienced during their learning moments at the Academy. You could say it is our “farewell” before we graduate in June and move on with our knew provided knowledge and skills. Each Senior chooses to focus on something for their project that makes them take risks and dive into something new, yet is still approved by Elective teachers. We have from around March to May to complete this all on our own to be presented to the class, similar to the Explorations project.
My Zenith
For this project, I went through different ideas on what I could make, something cool, unique, memorable that I’d be proud of. In the start, I decided on an animation based off my OC within the ‘One Piece’ verse, with different battle techniques. Unfortunately, after about a week, I scratched the idea, believing I didn’t have enough time to make something as complexed as that. The evening I realized I was going to change my idea, I was at school, after hours roaming the hallways until an idea struck me.
Something I’ve been wanting to do for so long, yet didn’t have the courage to do, a short film. Better yet, a graduation short film, ‘coming-of-age,’ something that I felt could connect to not only myself and my friends, but to majority of the Senior class of 2026. Now as an Animation student, it sounds odd that I’d want to do a film, but it’s a passion of mine to want to try and making short films, or simple videos in which I can tell a story (minus the background dumping, hours of writing, lore, etc).
Since I’m not a film student, this whole idea was going to be risky, which led me to look at various YouTube videos on crash course lessons surrounding filming, and student made short films about graduation, or the life of high school students. I also didn’t have any high-quality equipment other than the provided DSLR, which I used two throughout the film (Thanks to a classmate that lent me theirs during film days) and a small mic.
Because every Film needs actors, I asked some of my friends, including my AVID teacher to be apart of this, with Jaidyn, an AM student, being my main character. Following a typical Senior Student who’s falling behind–while their friends keep going through the year, unaware of their friend’s struggle.
How is this project a new challenge (a risk) for you? If you are in a group, define each of your roles and explain how each role will be a new challenge/risk for you. Also, how will you hold one another accountable for your roles? Note: To encourage and reward you for your risk taking, your process will be worth more of your overall grade than the completed project.
Progress
Now, because of the shorter time it felt like we had, and with issues finding actors for a while, I only had two weeks to film until Presentation week. Honestly, I was stressing out, because it felt like I might had to rush my project, but in reality–I still took my time, I put lots of care into this film and with how I wanted it to be, the message I was hoping to send.
I already had experience with After effects, Lightroom, and many other Adobe applications because of the many projects done at Freestyle Academy, but it felt different when trying to make a film. In extracting audio that fits the aspect of the film, the lighting and color changes to each scene to connect to what’s really happening–and to fix pacing between moments and dialogue.
For Lightroom, I managed to create a couple presets for each different type of scene such as, the rebuild arc, the beginning lighting, and the falling arc. This made it efficient when importing the files to quickly edit and cut down before exporting them back to Adobe Express. Work smarter not harder 🙂
Below are snapshots during the film.
The Final Outcome
Log Line:
A Senior student begins to struggle with deadlines and the pressures of their final year–thankfully help turns up to push them in the right direction.
I want to give a huge thank you to my friends and my teacher for being able to be a big part of my film, as I wouldn’t have been able to create it without them–the same goes for Freestyle Academy, as being there has shown me new ways to create art and to take risks in my own writing and dreams
Zenith Presentation
Although I know this film isn’t the absolute greatest, I’m very much proud of it–it challenged me to try something I’ve never done, and honestly? I’ve sparked a new interest out of it.
Thank you Freestyle Academy for what you’ve shown me, and thank you to those who helped me get to where I am now.
I hope to create more films, writings, and animations in my future.