What is the Zenith project?
The Zenith Project was a end of the year project aimed around giving us the students the freedom to create/ learn whatever we wanted in relation to our elective. Through this we would learn a new skill and teach our class the skills we learned as well as show the final product in a presentation towards the last few weeks of school.
What was my zenith project?
For my zenith I decided to partner up with fellow classmate Kosta Vujic and make a reality tv show. We researched how casting was done, what directions are the best for the best reactions, where the best camera placement is, and many other ideas that I had no idea went into reality television. Through our research of the making of reality television we decided to make a dating show focused around highschoolers. Our through process for coming up with this idea was that reality dating shows are common and a lot are alike nowadays. But have you seen one with highschoolers? The immaturity and high energy highschoolers have would make this show unique and funnier than lots of other dating shows. We watched many different reality dating shows to prepare for our show and found the funniest type of show was “Real Life Tinder.” The idea of this is that one person stands as a line of participants say a pickup line to the bachelor or bachelorette. They could either get swiped left or right, one resulting in elimination, and the other they would move onto the next round. In a later round we figured a 2 minute speed date where the main person gets to really meet the participants and make a choice based on who they like the best to win the show.
Our first step in making the show was outlining how the rounds would work and how many people would move on. We then had to find the contestants. For casting we already knew a group of guys and a girl that would be perfect for the role. Picking people with big personalities would make or break the show, which is why a big part of reality tv is casting. While letting the contestants be themselves and make the show believable we would also need to step in and guide the contesting lightly to the outcome we wanted to make the show more engaging.
Once we had our cast the show was a breeze from there all we had to do was set up the camera and say action. The cast actually guided the show to better places than we could write out. Overall I had lots of fun making this project and would love to do some type of reality tv again if I could. It was a great way to make fun of ourselves and have a laugh toward the stressful end of senior year.