Introduction

The Zenith project is the final project that Freestyle students do. It is called the Zenith project because Zenith means “the time at which something is most powerful or successful.”. This project is supposed to be the accumulation of all of the skills one has learned at Freestyle, so it’s called Zenith because it should be the best project. My Zenith project is a short animated film about “the call of the abyss”, or the impulsive thoughts one gets like “wow what if I jumped off this bridge”. I’m going to be using Adobe Animate, as well as After Effects and Photoshop to complete my project. I will utilize the skills in these programs to finish the film.

Process

my character design
storyboard
another storyboard

background
another background
rough animation with onion skins
title animation
clean lines
clean lines

Completed Project

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Reflection

I thought of the idea for my Zenith project right before I was about to fall asleep on February 24th, 2019. I wrote down my idea in my notes app, and promptly passed out. My idea was to do an animation about compulsions or intrusive thoughts. There’s this phenomenon commonly referred to as the “call of the void”, and it’s when someone is standing, for example, on the edge of a building and they have an impulse to jump off, even though they don’t really want to. I felt like this concept would be really interesting to explore through animation.

My research paper was about mental illness representation in pop culture and the media. I feel like my product kind of ties into this, because compulsions can be a real problem in people with OCD. The kind of intrusive thoughts my project focuses on are the harmless kind that everybody has, but this isn’t to say that they can’t become unhealthy in people with certain mental illnesses. I suppose my research paper tied into this because I didn’t want to be insensitive to people who suffer from OCD or any mental illness, so I guess my research helped me out with that.

For my collaboration, I kind of bounced ideas off of people to see if I took certain scenes too far, and how to handle sensitive material tastefully. It was really helpful to have other perspective on certain scenes that could potentially be a problem, and talking it through was helpful for the end product.

I feel like the 21st century skills I improved most on were risk-taking and visual literacy. The thing I’m most proud of about this project are the backgrounds, and they took up a significant chunk of my time. I also feel like I took on a potentially sensitive subject, which I haven’t done before in animation, necessarily. However, my self-direction could have been a lot better, seeing as I didn’t end up completely finishing.

This project was a great learning experience in terms of setting achievable goals. Looking back, I needed to simplify my backgrounds and settings a lot if I actually wanted to finish in the amount of time that was allotted. This will be very helpful in college because for my career path(research psychology), long-term projects with hard deadlines will be very important and I definitely learned the hard way through this project that sometimes the time you have isn’t enough to finish the product that you have in your head.

I feel like I might have achieved a couple of the goals I set out to do. I think I improved my animation a little; even though there are still issues with timing, my staying on model was a little bit better. This project is probably one of the best things I’ve done at Freestyle, but that’s not saying much because the bar was very low, just basing it off of my old projects.

Even though I’m not pursuing art or animation as a career path, this project still has value to me and I’m glad I did it. It was fun to have pretty much no bounds on what I could do content-wise, and I’m going to keep doing animation as a hobby maybe.