Zenith
Introduction
The Zenith Project in general is our last elective project in Freestyle Academy and it is a chance to expand on one of our passions or interest and making something out of it. Zenith is defined as the highest point or, “the time at which something is most powerful or successful”.
My Zenith Project is a poetic/experimental documentary that serves as a closing or goodbye to childhood. It reflects on numerous high school seniors around the world, about their childhood memories, coming of age challenges, and what they hope for the future. With these reflections inserted in audio soundclips, we have b-roll of digital camera footage to show visual nostalgia or animation to show memories.
This particular project is a passion for me because I’m interested in non-fiction stories– especially of those who I can connect with or am similar to. This served as a project where I could reflect on my childhood experiences as well as coming of age challenges while interviewees did too. It was a chance for my partner Kylie and I to demonstrate that even though everyone had a different experience in childhood & in coming of age, we’re still very similar in so many ways– going through similar insecurities, having similar thoughts, or acting in a certain way.
Here is the structure we came up with at Peets!
Here is our list of scheduled interviews we did (in-person & on zoom)
Here is our notes from listening through our interviewee’s audio– the soundbites we want to include and b-roll footage/animation we need.
Here is us piecing together some of the soundbites for our rough cut!
Process
This project was a new challenge for Kylie and I since both of us has never done animation before.
We didn’t know where to start even though we were curious. Because of this, we learned the process of how to animate while we worked on our film which delayed the process by a lot. The animation took longer than we expected and it was harder but also easier than we thought.
Another challenge was to fill up the 12 minutes of audio soundbites that did not have any footage. We inserted as much digital camera footage we could from the b-roll we got but filling up 12 minutes was a lot and took longer than expected.
In terms of our roles, we both outlined the structure of what we wanted the film to consist of as well as came up with questions we wanted to ask. I found most of our interviewees (in person and zoom) while Kylie reached out to our actor that we worked with for our b-roll. During our interview, if it was in person, Kylie asked the questions while I recorded on my camera and Tascam. If it was Zoom, we both asked the questions. After the interviews were done, we both went over the audios and took notes on what was most important/what we wanted to include. We then edited those into Adobe Premiere and started animating, as well as selecting the digital camera footage that matched what the interviewee was talking about. We held each other accountable for our roles by communicating with each other and making sure both of us were meeting our deadlines.
We incorporated our production class skills into our project because we had pre-production where we wrote and structured our film as well as contact around 50 people for interviews, production where we went to each of the interviewee’s houses to film interviews, do zoom interviews, and film digital camera footage for b-roll, or post-production where we listened to around 30 interviews that are each 20-40 minutes and looked for which soundbites we can use to place into Adobe Premiere, and insert digital camera footage on top of the soundbites. Lastly, we created animation for the rest where we could not use any digital camera footage.