ZENITH

ZENITH

The Zenith Project gave us the opportunity to design and create our own project. Since I am a second semester senior, I knew I would want to do a project that I was passionate about and would have fun with. Because of this, I decided I wanted to write and direct the first five or so minutes of a pilot episode of a sitcom, starring my 4 best friends.

INSPIRATION

A lot of my inspiration also came from The Office, a classic sitcom. I really liked The Office because I loved how it was a sitcom with documentary style incorporated in it, in addition to the simple setting, funny characters, and the comedic use of improv.

RESEARCH

For the English portion of our project, we had to write a research paper about something relating to our project, with 2 different perspectives involved. An easy research question for my project was what makes a pilot episode of a sitcom successful? After researching and getting a lot of information from the book Writing Television Sitcoms, by Evan B. Smith, I found two answers to this question. The first perspective was that a pilot episode of a sitcom’s success comes from the characters and their relationships. The other perspective was that a pilot episode of a sitcom’s success comes from the plot, or the situation, that the characters are put through.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PRE-PRODUCTION

During pre-production, I developed my 4 main characters, which were heavily influenced by my friends’ personalities, wrote a 5 page screenplay with revisions, in addition to creating a shot list and then lining my screenplay based on that shot list I created.

MalloryC- Shot List

MalloryC- Screenplay Revised

MalloryC- Lined Screenplay

  

FILMING

A huge thanks goes out to Sydney Mozer for helping me film every scene, filming once a week, which took us about 4 days total. Since we are all friends, on set was a little chaotic and not everything I wanted to get done was done, but we had a lot of fun and filming them in their natural environment really helped incorporate comedic improv, like The Office does.

EDITING

For editing, I used adobe premiere, the application we have used the past 2 years in our film production class.

  

FINAL PRODUCT

REFLECTION

After completing this project, I realized that the situation does matter when creating a pilot episode. I found that my film was more boring than I had hoped  since their wasn’t much on a conflict that they were in. I also wish I was more organized and used my shot list more during filming. However, we all had a lot of fun filming together and creating The Pak, will be something we can look back on in 20 years.