The Zenith project is the final project in Freestyle. It is supposed to show all the skills and tools you learned throughout your freestyle career in a project that you are passionate about. This is a project that you chose to do something you want to do and is very fun(in my experience). For my Zenith project, I chose to team up with Jack and create a reality TV dating show inspired by youtube channels and similar shows like The Bachelorette.

We first started by making an idea for our project. We needed to make the show unique because there are millions of reality TV shows being made each year, so why should ours be made? Our show focused on the idea of high schoolers dating and having multiple stages of dating in order to win the show. We had the idea to add a game after eh pick-up lines part in order to test the contestants’ brains and for them to prove to the bachelorette that they have brains too.

After we had our idea finished we began researching about how reality TV is actually made. A big part of this project was that research and learning what it takes to make reality TV. This research also opened us up to many other shows that also influenced our show. Without this research, our show would have been much worse and it would have taken much longer to film and edit. We learned many new filming styles and editing styles which made our show feel more like reality TV.

After our research, we need to plan out our whole show in detail and create a 3 Act Structure. From our research, we learned that even reality TV needs this structure and without it, our show would not be able to function. So we created these acts and went into detail about how we would shoot each part and how long it would take to shoot these parts. This created a much easier shooting process and a way more efficient one as well.

After all the preparation was done we began shooting. This was definitely the most challenging part of our project because we had so many technical difficulties. On our first shoot day, no one showed up and we were forced to push back shooting a week which really made our time schedule tight. This resulted in us not fully finishing the project but we still created something that we are proud of. Throughout, shooting we used many of our research techniques like the dual camera setup. Overall, we are proud of what we made.

Reflection

I chose the idea of a reality dating show for my Zenith project because I thought it would be super entertaining and fun. I previously watched many of these shows on youtube and tv, and every time I would watch I found myself laughing and having fun. These shows like the bachelor/bachelorette, along with youtube channels like the SIDEMAN, Jubile, and Cut all inspired me to make this show. I wanted to create something similar to them but with my own spin on it. So I chose to collaborate with Jack because we have a similar sense of humor. I think we did a good job planning out the whole project and inviting a good idea. We did a lot of research about the reality TV industry along with the fact that we watched many shows that were similar to our idea. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to show our idea to the full extent because we ran out of time and had many difficulties along the way. 

In all of this, I would say I most improved on visual literacy and creativity, while my high productivity went down. I would say my visual literacy improved because I feel like we made a reality dating show that looks good enough and doesn’t look horrible, which is an improvement from my previous movies this year. My creativity also improved because of this project due to the fact that my partner and I had to think of this show by ourselves and come up with all the things we needed which brought our creativity up. However, we struggled with high productivity because we didn’t film all the things we wanted to film because we ran out of time and just didn’t expect all the setbacks we experienced. The biggest setback that we experienced was the fact that our crew didn’t show up on our first day of shooting. This caused us to move filming a week later which shifted up our whole schedule and didn’t leave us with enough time to finish.

 Overall, I think ignited my passion and elevated my skills in this project but I don’t think I fully made the ultimate project. All the setbacks that I mentioned previously didn’t allow me and my partner to achieve this goal. However, I think we both showed our passion for filmmaking and throughout this project elevated our skills. We worked through these difficulties and showed perseverance and made something similar to what we wanted.  For my future projects and if I was to do this project again I intend to plan more accordingly and think more realistically because we tried to do too much in too little of a time-space. Another learning experience from this project is to be better at compromising with your partner. My partner and I had many disagreements which wasted our time, so I hope in future projects I can learn to solve disagreements quicker.