Zenith is the final project at Freestyle. As the name suggests, Zenith is supposed to be the peak of all our skills that we’ve learned from the past two years at Freestyle in order to make the best, most polished product possible.

For my Zenith project, I decided to make an observational documentary about making dumplings. I wanted to focus on cinematography for this project, so I figured that an observational documentary would give that interest a more focused end goal. This was a new challenge for me because the only time I’ve made a film relying solely on visuals, it was a fictional narrative, but this time, I had to rely on visuals to tell a true story. I also am not a big fan of traditional documentaries and nonfiction film in general so this is outside the realm of what I tend to gravitate to. For this project I also had to do preproduction, production and postproduction for the whole thing.

Process

I worked on this project over the course of a month with a weekly check in on my process. On the first week, I started by watching and researching other observational documentaries. I recorded the name of all the ones I watched and added notes about what I liked from the examples I watched. On the second week, I made my shooting plan. I wrote down the shots I wanted to get but also kept the plan pretty vague to allow for day of changes. On the third week, I actually shot my documentary. I spent two days filming everything to make sure that I didn’t miss anything. And on the fourth and final week, I spent the week editing a rough cut and a final cut of my documentary.

Click through the images in the gallery below to take a closer look at my process.

Product + Reflection

Overall, I loved the Zenith project. The open-ended, self-directed nature of this project was the most Freestyle-esque way to end off my two years here. I got take everything I’ve learned from film at Freestyle and put it all towards this documentary that was completely my idea and direction. While it wasn’t all easy, I’ve grown to really love the process of making observational documentaries. While observational documentaries are nonfiction, they feel more lively since the camera is always moving and what’s being filmed can’t always be perfectly scripted and planned out. Moving on from this project and Freestyle, I hope to take what I’ve learned to further improve my skills behind the camera and work to get even more beautiful shots with a camera.

Below is my completed Zenith project, please enjoy!