What is Zenith?


The Zenith project is the big thing for senior Freestyle students. It’s basically our senior thesis’s, the last thing we do at Freestyle, our final statements. The basic gist of the project is to use what we’ve learned in our two years here and apply it to a project of our own creation. We get to decide what to make as long as it ties in to Freestyle and our elective.

I decided to do a project on costume designing and film scoring because I felt that would be really fun way of combining my passion of music with my mandatory design elements. For the theme I went post apocalyptic because I really love the setting and it would allow me to get really creative. I would be able to get as crazy as I wanted while still being grounded in the reality of the setting.

For inspiration I looked at a lot of post apocalyptic media, namely the Mad Max Films and the Fallout games. (BTW I love the Fallout franchise, New Vegas is my favorite game of all time.)

Post Apocalyptic Costume Design

Fallout - Quora

A lot of post apocalyptic costume and prop design relies on repurposing old junk. This is the wasteland we’re talking about, whatever you can find any use for you’re going to use. One of my favorite examples of this comes from Fallout: New Vegas. In the game, the armor that Caesar’s Legion wears seems threatening but all it is is mopified football gear from the University of Arizona. I really like small details like this because they add so much depth, world building, and visual storytelling to the setting.

In the spirit of visual storytelling I took a bunch of old junk (sports gear, metal, cookware, belts, etc.) and made four costumes, here’s what they look like.

To better display these costumes, I made movie posters for the short film I was going to try making before quarantine happened.

Score

For my score I was very influenced by spaghetti western soundtracks as wells as contemporary orchestral music, jazz, and symphonic metal.