The Zenith project is a based around the individual. Everything from the what you are doing to how you are being graded is made by yourself. The reason why it is called the Zenith project is because Zenith means “the time at which something is most powerful”, and after almost completing our freestyle journey we are at the peak of our knowledge which is why it is called the Zenith project.
For my particular Zenith project I am doing a series of comedy skits. My passion for this project comes from my passion for comedy and loving to make people laugh. I envision my final product being comedy skits which are filmed and cut into bit size comedy bits.
This project is going to be a risk because all comedy is risky. You never know if a joke will hit or not, or if people will find it funny in general. Also this will be the first time that I am working with audio while filming and editing scenes.
I am using all my knowledge about brainstorming, writing, filming, and editing that I have learned over the past year in my Freestyle Film class. All these skills will come in hand and help me face new challenges that may arise due to me working with audio for the first time.
Below is a document where I brainstormed my ideas.
Below are scripts that I wrote for the sketches.
Here are photos of the Adobe Premiere Pro files that where I edited the footage.
After all the hard work, I combined the sketches into one video and here it is. The three sketches are unrelated.
Zenith Reflection
I got the idea for my zenith last year while watching the other seniors present their zenith’s. I thought Jake’s comedy skits were hilarious and I wanted to try my hand at creating comedy sketches. I was also inspired by comedy shows like Key and Peele, The Office, Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and Community. Through my research I learned that writing comedy is very tricky and requires a specific mind. Although my Research Paper was different from my zenith project because I had no plan on doing dark comedy, it made me respect the people who do, do to the fine line that you walk when you write and perform dark comedy. I did still choose to do comedy of some sort, and my research paper helped because I learned how other people write comedy and I used parts of their process in my process. One specific recurring step that many went through was testing jokes and ideas. Comedians test and revise jokes based on reactions from trusted people and audiences when they are performing. This helped me a lot through my Zenith process because having second opinions always made my idea better. Some of the other ways that I collaborated with people are casting them in my short films and having them help me throughout the editing process of my dialogue scene. They helped a lot in editing my dialogue scene because it was my first time and I was unsure how to edit it in a way that made sense. If I could do my project over I would have shoot my videos earlier so that I would have more time editing because that is where I believe one of my weak points was. Through editing I think that I could have put the audience into the scene better and I think that it would have improved the story telling of the sketch. Another thing that I would have changed is got better audio for my clips because I had to use my camera audio because my audio recorder stopped working.
I improved the mostly in creative thinking and collaboration, because all of my sketches were ideas that I came up with. A major part of my the process of the project was that I needed to come up with creative original ideas for sketches, this took a majority of the time because most of the ideas that I thought of were not very good. The first two weeks I was always thinking about things that I thought were funny and if I could turn them into a sketch or not. Collaboration, which I already touched on, was a big part of the process because I wouldn’t have come up with the fleshed out ideas that I did if it wasn’t for my peers helping me. I improved the least on critical thinking, due to most of my sketch ideas not having a deeper meaning other than just trying to be funny. If I had more time I might have come up with more complicated sketches, but because of the time constraints of the project I choose to do shorter simpler sketches.
This project I learned about myself, specifically about how to time manage myself. The deadlines that I set for myself were really helpful in knowing how much to do and by when. I will definitely use the same technique of planning out realistic deadlines for large projects in the future, especially on projects in college.
I think that I accomplished almost all the project objectives. I ignited my passion for comedy and sketch making by creating sketches. I elevated my skills of creative thinking, film making, and film editing. However I don’t think that it was my most successful project because there still some things that I would like to change in the short films.
This projects lasting value for me was definitely learning how to think creatively, and learning a lot about self managing a large project.