Showcase

Hello! My name is Katie Bousse, and I’m a senior film student at Freestyle Academy. For the past two years that I’ve been in Freestyle, I’ve spent my time learning about design, filmmaking, coding and creative writing. Outside of the work I do here, I spend my time reading, cooking and hanging out with my friends.

I am really excited to share my work with you for my Senior Showcase. I chose my Junior Documentary, my Senior Narrative and my Zenith project because I think pieces reflect my greatest achievements at Freestyle and also really show how I’ve grown as a filmmaker and as a student. For my Documentary project about the importance of art in schools, I took the lead on shooting B-roll and editing while my partner focused handling the interviews and audio mixing. Through that project,  I learned about how important a compelling and consistent narrative is, and how the good visuals are just as necessary as a good story. My Senior Narrative, a short film about an elderly hit-woman, I really focused on the story and trying to make a compelling character arc. I felt like I was able gain experience in an area of film that I wasn’t familiar with beforehand. My Zenith was the final project I completed here at Freestyle and one of the first I did on my own. I studied costume design in film and created several costumes of my own, along with a short scene and a video outlining my process. I felt like I was able to use all the skills I’ve learned here at Freestyle and also gain a new appreciation for an often unnoticed area of filmmaking.

Next year, I plan to study Biology at Loyola Marymount University, though I hope to be able to still take film classes. It’s exciting and also a little intimidating to be living a big city like Los Angeles, but new experiences are always good!

You can reach me at katie.bousse11@gmail.com

Junior Documentary

My documentary film tells the story of the CSMA, or Community School of Music and Arts, and their fight for better art education in schools.

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My partner Hudson Jones and I worked on this documentary for several months. I was initially introduced to this project through my mom, who is an art teacher at Springer Elementary School and works for the CSMA. I knew about her struggles with getting enough funding, and I was also interested in researching how art can influence children’s education, and why keeping art classes in schools is really important. We were fortunate to have many connections to interviewees that helped us establish our narrative.

I had spent a lot of time writing a research paper on the subject of art education for English class, so I knew that the story was going to be important. I really wanted viewers to understand why art education is necessary after watching the documentary. However, I did underestimate how much footage it would take to make our film visually interesting also. We had to get creative to get enough B-roll. The hardest part of the whole process was probably trying to mix audio, which was something I had no experience in. Ultimately, I was really happy with our final project and I thought it really got our message across.

Senior Narrative

My senior narrative is about an old woman who buries bodies for living, and the ensuing problems she finds herself in.

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The senior narrative is probably the most difficult project we do as a Freestyle film student. It combined everything we already had learned about making movies and added screenwriting, lighting, audio, cinematography and more. I made Mabel the Professional with my partner Marisa Novotarski. The first step in the process was screenwriting, another element of filmmaking that I had zero experience in. I wanted to write a good story with a compelling character arc, which proved more difficult that I thought. I wanted the characters actions to make sense to the larger story, and also for viewer to understand the development of the protagonist. I’m not sure how successful we were in the end, but it was an amazing experience nonetheless.

This project was a huge undertaking, and I was probably the most surprised that we managed to pull it off. There was a lot of problems that had to be solved last minute, and hours spent after school trying to find the perfect sound effect or best way to arrange a scene. I used all the experiences and skills from my first narrative and other Junior year project to finish this project, and not just film skills. Things like time management and communication were key to creating what we did. In the end, I think that its not at all perfect, but I’m proud of it anyways.

 

Zenith

For my Zenith Project, I studied costume design in film and did my best to replicate the process of an actual costume designer. I made 5 costumes total, and also two short videos to explain my process and show my costumes in action.

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Costume design was something that I had always been interested in, and the Zenith project gave me the perfect opportunity to explore it more in depth. I really admire professional costume designers because it requires so much knowledge, skill and patience to make the perfect costume. Since I had such a good experience with the documentary project, I wanted to create something similar to explain how I adapted my project. Along with the scene, I feel like I used all the skills that I’ve acquired at Freestyle these past 2 years to complete this project, and also learned more about costume design.