Zenith

Introduction

The Zenith project is the final project that seniors at Freestyle Academy complete in their elective classes. It is supposed to be the most polished and advanced project that students will complete. I am a film student, and for my Zenith project I chose to create two classical guitar music videos. I used my guitar playing skills, my recording skills, my filming skills, and my editing skills to create videos of myself playing Danza Brasileira by Jorge Morel and Vals no. 4 by Agustin Barrios.

Preproduction

First, I had to plan out my project. I set deadlines for what I wanted done each week during the duration of my project. Then I chose music. I chose Danza Brasileira and Vals no. 4 to play because I knew them well, because they are different styles of music, and because those are the songs in my repertoire that would be most interesting to viewers. I found the sheet music and then planned out the shots for both songs. Originally I was going to have storylines for both videos to align with the visuals, but after some plans fell through I realized that the focus of the videos was the actual music. I decided to simplify my plans for the visuals and just focus on me playing guitar. That said, I changed scenery and shots to fit the color of different sections. The last thing that I did in the planning of my videos was to reserve the recording studio for different times.

Here is an example of some of the storyboarding that I did. The storyboarding was useful in helping me keep track of which shots I needed.
This is an example of some of the sheet music that I had, (the first page of Danza Brasileira).
Here is part of the calendar that I made for tracking my deadlines in the project.

Production

Production consisted of two parts – filming and recording. I recorded myself first. To record I used Freestyle’s soundproof studio. I played guitar into a voice mic controlled by ProTools from the studio’s computer. My recordings were both individual sections and complete run throughs. Once I had several recordings of both songs, I went out and started filming myself play. I filmed myself playing guitar at Stanford, downtown Mountain View, and at the courtyard of a local church building. To film I brought my twin brother Sam to help me. He would sit on the chair while I set up the camera, then focused and framed the shot. We then would switch places and I would start to play. Production is not hard. I just needed to make time for it and to go out and get footage.

Postproduction

Once I had all my footage and recordings, it was time to edit. First I edited my recordings in ProTools. I edited the best takes of each section together and then added fades. Then I added plugins like EQ and DeEsser to the recording. In hindsight, a lot of these plugins were unnecessary and I should have focused on making one complete run through with minimal edits. After I made completed recordings, I put the recordings in Adobe Premiere and started to add visuals. It was difficult to sync up visuals with the audio because I was playing at slightly different speeds in the recordings and the film. After syncing up the visuals, which was the most time consuming part of the project, I color graded the visuals and added fades and credits. Below are my completed Zenith projects.

Reflection