What is Zenith?
The Zenith project is the final project seniors do at freestyle. Its meant to be the about choosing a project, organizing it, and completing it.
And Freestyle has alot of equipment, film equipment, camera equipment. So I decided to make my Zenith learning all of the equipment, or Film Grip. Film Grip is the job of choosing what to the put the camera on in order to get the wanted shot. Like a tripod, dolly, or drone. And I set my goal to make a short film, where every shot is using the equipment in a unique way.
The risk of this whole project, is every film shoot I have done before has used very basic shots. Never moving the camera, never putting the camera in a unique spot. So doing a film shoot with this add complexity, will likely have problems.
Creation Time
Learning Equipment
I spent weeks 3 and 4 learning equipment. Every day in class I would choose a piece of equipment and learn every function, ability, and weakness of it. (Weeks 1 and 2 where spent choosing a subject)
I also developed a list of what every piece of equipment could and couldn’t do. Such as what directions it can control rotation. Which axes it can handle controlling position. This way I could tell what piece of equipment would be best for which shot.
Planning
Return from Spring Break I spent weeks 5 and 6 planning the story and film shoots. I made up of very basic story of a golfer who continuously messes up for the whole film, the main purpose of it was to have something crazy camera moves could enhance. And to make filming go efficiently I planned every shot in the film in a storyboard. And I was quite ambitious with this storyboard, making some shots incredibly complex, but if it turned out to be impossible I could scale it down. I also created a location list, and prop list to make even more sure filming could go smoothly.
Production
At this point I had filmed nothing for 6 weeks, so I had to finish it all in the next 2. And the biggest problem was that everybody else was busy finishing their Zeniths, so finding people to help or act was difficult. So to make finding people possible I made the compromise of switch actors throughout the film, as the core focus was on camera moves not on continuity or props. This made the film less film like, but it did allow me to work with a bunch of different people which was fun.
After the first shoot I realized for student films, having a lot of equipment is more of a detriment then a bonus. As it adds a lot of overhead of moving equipment and setting up equipment. So, for the rest of the shoots, I scaled down to just using a tripod, gimble, and drone. As those cover just about every camera move in existence.
Editing
Throughout production I was also editing, to see what was working and what wasn’t. The editing process was fun, as I got to see how all the intentions behind the shots worked out. Like how fast spinning shots show movement. The moving in shots show focus. And overall the amount of fast movement the film contains.
And in the final two days before the project was due, I did all the VFX work. Which was super dense, but also fun. And I ended up going more ambitious with the VFX then I planned, but it came out pretty good.
The Final Result
So after all that work, this film was produced.
(Video is not uploaded yet)
Here is the Zenith Presentation itself, were I talk about the project as a whole.
Reflection
Here is a reflection on this project.