For my Zenith Project, I decided to write a script for a musical, design a poster, and take pictures for character references.

 

About the Whole Experience 

 

One day in middle school I looked around the room and realized that I was different. I wore outlandish outfits and acted to a hyperextend around people I knew well and I also had a thing for bursting out into random song. I was basically a walking talking musical and still am today, I just know how to hide it a little better, that’s why I decided to express that side of me through my Zenith by writing a musical.

When we started Zenith I had been all over the place. I didn’t know if I wanted to do something with clothes, music, or writing. But after trying to come up with things that would keep me busy for the next three months I decided that writing a musical and taking cast photos would be my best bet. When I was starting Zenith I came up with a few problems. One was that I had no idea how to write a musical and two I had never fully read a real broadway script, and three I had three months to learn how to write a musical and actually write it and make it interesting. I quickly realized that this was going to be a lot more work than I expected and to continue this would have to be the most amazing thing I ever produced. Which lead to about eight more stress-ridden headaches. But as my procrastination induced shopping on amazon continued and my music played on shuffle I came across a musical with an exciting history.

Spring Awakening, a story about german teenagers finding their sexual awakening in a small town Germany in 1898. It was a play written as a play in the late eighteen hundreds and then made into musical in 2006 the music spoke to me and I quickly became obsessed. I then and there went back onto amazon this time with a purpose and searched for the screenplay for the play as well as the screenplay for the musical. After about ten minutes three books were ordered and my card was about thirty some dollars lighter. But that is where I got my slow start to a long exciting Zenith Project.

The writing was the part of this project that had seemed to pull me under more than once. Why? You may ask Because I went through a cycle of loving it reading it hating it revising it and then back to loving it reading it, and so on. Even though I enjoyed writing and building up these characters and the world they live in it almost always seemed to be changing. I couldn’t keep up with the ideas that kept popping up in my mind till the last week on the project when everything came together. It was weird and amazing to see all the ideas from the beginning made it into the end but with so much more authority and how the characters actually grew and became who they were supposed to be.

Throughout the project, I did a few table reads and talked with one of my friends who has been acting for years. We really worked on the realness of the dialogue and the progression of the characters in the story. I also used models to help portray my characters so I would be able to see them and show others how I felt they should dress, look, and act. That was really fun because we all just had a good time hanging out and taking pictures for about two hours.

When we had finally got to the day of presentations I was so nervous about it but I was also so excited to share everything I had learned and share my final product. I myself was unsure of the final product because I felt it could use more revisions as always but after hearing the reaction and the positive responses I was overwhelmed with joy.

I will say it now that I will definitely consider writing a screenplay again and plan to revisit this one in the future whether it is to expand it or work on the songs. I really do feel like this was my ultimate Freestyle project. I did something I loved and put so much work into it and I love the end product.

There were so many things about this project that I loved and it helped me grow in more ways than one. Even though it was stressful at times and I may have fallen behind on a few due dates the end product blew my own mind away and seeing the response from everyone at the end was just amazing. It was so difficult and crazy but I wouldn’t trade this experience for the world.