Zenith
The term Zenith is defined as a time in which something is its most powerful or successful, which makes sense for why our final project is called that. At Freestyle, we have spent the last two years learning skills we, at least for the most part, have never been exposed to. And now we are at the final stretch of our high school career.
Why not have a project as powerful as that?
The Process
My Zenith project in summary, was to create art that related to my mood, mental state, experiences for 30 days. The premise originally was to do no more than 10 2D animations, and no less than 20 drawings. I decided to do 2D since I had never really done it before besides my experimental film (which I ended up doing the night before it was due) and I wanted to try it again. However, closer to the end of the project, I realized 10 animations that are over 400 frames is a lot. And with work, school, sports, and college things I was not going to have time for those 10. So instead I focused on doing about 5 or 6 animations, alongside 25 or more drawings for 30 days. The reason I did this was for multiple reasons. For one, I have been lacking creative inspiration when it comes to creating drawings/art in general lately. And wanted to see if having to make a drawing each day, even if it is not a super detailed or complex thing, would help get me out of my artist block.
This project was a challenge for me for a number of reasons. For one, since I was in Film for my first year of Freestyle, I had never been taught how to do 2D animation before. So for this project I needed to do research and try to create simple animations without having much if any practice time. In addition, one of my issues was the amount of work I had assigned myself for the zenith. The 2D animations take multiple hours to complete one which makes it so there’s less time to create other art. On top of those animations I then need to draw over 20 other art pieces. And within the animations themselves, I also used a completely new software called Opentoonz. Which although I loved, it would crash… like a lot. Leaving there to be a lot less time to animate. And finally, as I had mentioned before: my artist block. I have been struggling for a while creatively. So even though this project is meant to break me out of that block, it has been difficult to draw things that are creative, and drawn well. I wasn’t expecting super complex big pieces for myself to create, but just drawing something that I like that I think is drawn well.