Introduction
The Zenith project is all about taking everything you’ve learned at Freestyle and taking it to the next level. There are practically no limitations to what you can do as long as it relates to your elective, mine being Film. I initially intended for my project to have elements of screenwriting, directing multiple actors on a solo project and doing live audio, and then adding special effects with Adobe After Effects. Although I still wrote a short screenplay for two scenes, I did not end up using that. Instead, I did a scene with just one actor where we recorded the audio later intended to be used as a voiceover. The main reason I had to change my project was due to scheduling conflicts with actors, I got the actors I wanted but I couldn’t get them all together at one time.
As for what the scene I filmed actually is, it is a scene near the beginning of my world building story that I created in English, one where the main character is reflecting alone on her current life situation. I think this particular idea was a risk for me because I had little experience writing inner monologues, especially given the fact that this was supposed to be a more personal reflection for the character. I had intended the context of the voice over to be that she was writing a journal entry, but looking back, I think I probably should have made that more clear.
The skills I used from my film class were framing of the shots, using focus to highlight my subject, and using Premiere Pro to edit the clips together.
Process
There is not a lot to talk about in terms of pre-production and production, so I will just focus on post-production in this section. I started editing by putting together my audio and video clips into a Premiere Pro file and adding some basic filters on top of the video footage.
My next step was to add more complex filters in After Effects. The primary effect I used to get the visual style was the cartoon effect, but I also added a glass effect for the first iteration. I didn’t like the first iteration because of the black lines, and I also thought the glass effect may be too distracting, so I decided to remove the outlines which helped bring the attention away from the glass effect.
Once I made these changes, I think the result looked a lot better. A lot of the shots as still frames look like they could be some sort of oil painting.
Below is a screenshot of my After Effects interface after I color corrected the video. I decided to have a heavy emphasis on the gold, as this scene takes place during sunset. The effects and color correction are a little extreme admittedly, but I really love the way it turned out.
Final Result
This is my favorite shot of the whole video, I really like it because it shows the main character just staring off into space, and I think the colors here worked really well, with the blue jeans, journal, and her red hair really standing out.
You can watch the finished product below on the Freestyle YouTube channel. I hope you enjoy it!