Zenith

The Zenith project is essentially in the words of Mr. Taylor, “The Ultimate Freestyle Project.” It is the culmination of all the skills we have learned in our media class throughout our two years at freestyle, and it gives us the chance to pursue in depth a topic we are interested about.

My Zenith project is two documentary styled films, one about stress amongst teens in the Silicon Valley and the other about sexual harassment and toxic masculinity. I was inspired by a play we just put on at Los Altos High School called Kissed the Girls and Made them Cry by Arlene Hutton which tackles these issues that modern teenagers deal with, especially focusing on sexual harassment and the culture of consent among our generation. For these films, I envisioned a very narrative, story-like documentary without talking heads with the purpose of putting the viewer into the shoes of the interviewees and actually experience what they are talking about. My goal with these videos is to put them together in such a way that invokes an emotional response amongst the viewers.

Oscar Dufosse as Dennis in Broken Box’s production of Kissed the Girls and Made them Cry by Arlene Hutton

I decided to dive into these topics because in general, these topics are considered taboo in our society. There is so much stigma around them and it just pushes anyone going through something like that further down, instead of us collectively coming together as a society to help each other up. I think that it’s important to get these conversations started so that we can work on unraveling the walls we have put up shielding us from these serious matters. Because the more we ignore it, the worse it’s going to get.

This project is a challenge for me because it’s going to be a lot to deal with at once so I have to be pretty on top of scheduling and planning which is something I struggle with. It’s also very different from the style of documentary we did in Film my junior year, and so it’ll be more of a challenge putting together footage that not only aids the audio but tells a story in such a way that incites an emotional response. I’ll be using techniques I learned during the documentary unit as well as what I learned about storytelling and editing from the narrative units.

Proposal

We have all seen informative videos on serious issues such as depression, sexual harassment, and peer pressure. These videos are sent out to the public as a way to make people more aware and to incite them to take action to better these issues. However, most of the time these videos just spew out facts that, while surprising at times, don’t trigger as much of an emotional response. I want to make a video series that addresses these serious issues in a way that incites more emotion and connection with the person going through that issue.

However, while I have some ideas, I’m not currently familiar enough with the way the human mind perceives things to be emotional or how different emotional triggers are for different people. I knew from the beginning that I wanted my Zenith to have a documentary aspect as I want to explore the different kinds of documentaries and combine the traditional talking heads with more artistic components.

Creating this documentary would help me piece together what I learn into a commentary on how society has conditioned us to think and feel certain ways. I want to talk to experts on human behavior and possibly even conduct social experiments to observe the amount of sensitivity amongst different groups of people when it comes to heavy or even maybe slightly offensive topics.

Purpose: To find a way to connect emotionally with people to start addressing the web of mental health issues that plague our generation and find the problems in the roots of our society.

Pre-Production

Shot Lists

Layout #1


Stress Amongst Teens in the Silicon Valley

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Sexual Harassment

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Toxic Masculinity

Coming Soon

Reflection

Process

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