Introduction

My Zenith Project is writing, filming, and editing 1 (or possibly 1-2) short narrative film(s) with a partner, Nisha Malley. It’s a project we are both passionate about because we enjoyed working on the senior narrative project this year and are excited to create a beautiful story arc that also looks professional on screen. Most likely the films would have little to no dialogue and end up around the 4-5 minute mark.

This Zenith project is a new challenge for me/us because we have never written out an entire screenplay for a film with limited dialogue. It will push our creativity in our writing as we find creative ways to expedite the plot and the story without the crutch of dialogue that often lengthens the story. This way, there will be more audience engagement as the viewer is more likely to “figure out the plot themselves” rather than the characters saying it out loud. We will both work work together on all aspects of our film including screenwriting, casting, filming, and editing. We will hold each other accountable by constantly communicating with one another and collaborating as oft as possible, especially during class time. We will set specific/manageable deadlines and will push ourselves to both meet the deadlines on time together.

For Film, we will write the screenplay, shoot, and edit the entire film which encompasses many aspects of pre-production, production, and post-production. This is very similar to the process of the Senior Narrative Film project that we just completed. However, we will strive to create a product of even higher quality both visually and in relation to the plot.

Process

We were planning on writing a story about a waitress who tries to get the cook/chef and a patron at a restaurant to fall in love on a sad Valentines’ day but we soon realized that it was too similar to the senior narrative I worked on, A Blind Date, and too similar to the senior narrative Nisha worked on, The Move. Basically, the initial idea was the birth of both of our senior narrative ideas. We decided to scrap the idea entirely and move on to something else. Maybe that story will be pursued at a later point in time.

Then we drafted a rough draft for our advertisement about a man with poor eyesight. However, we came to the conclusion that although it would be aesthetically pleasing and in the end Fabio would get his glasses, he did not grow as a character. It was a flat story that would not turn out as a beautiful advertisement without some major rewriting and plot twisting. Fresh out of new ideas we decided to scrap this as well and move on.

Our idea for Moogle Home came first. We decided that it would be funny to do a spoof instead of an advertisement where we made fun of artificial intelligence that has becoming more and more a part of our daily lives, such as Google Home, Alexa, etc. We wrote Moogle Home as a AI device that purposefully manipulated what the main character, Ryan requested. The conflict would be that Moogle would never cooperate and as a result Ryan would become more and more frustrated. Finally, Ryan would give up and Moogle would fall silent. There’s a plot twist/surprise ending, but you’ll have to watch it to find out. We ended up casting Nisha’s friend as Ryan and our friend Brooke is the voice of Moogle. This made production relatively simple and we were able to get almost full coverage in one shoot with our main actor and some other insert shots fairly quickly. For postproduction, Nisha created a video in Adobe AfterEffects of the ending (see below in the film, I don’t want to spoil it) as well as the beautiful closing credits. Otherwise, we used many sound effects to create the atmosphere we were going for.

In the midst of this, we were still brainstorming for our second short film. We had an idea about a man who goes on vacation but is pestered by his boss the entire time. We toyed with the idea of making him the boss instead of the employee. We rewrote, casted, realized that our script was going way to long, and ended up scrapping the entire project due to the restricted availability of our actors and a lengthy screenplay.

Finally, finally we came to the conclusion that we were running out of time and made some executive decisions to make our second short film as simple as possible. Our brainstorming started with an idea about a group project set in a school library, because I was drowning in a poorly organized economics project. Spring boarding off this idea, we came up with the idea of a group project working on a sound project for physics. We wanted each character to be unique and relatable, creating four personalities with names after the first four letters of the Alphabet. Adri: the leader of the project who won’t let you forget, controlling, likes to get stuff done, organized, practical. Brian: quiet, fidgety, nervous energy, secretly smart but no one knows because they don’t take the time to listen to him. Cathy: just not smart, tries really hard but of no avail. Derek: the slacker in every project, shows up way late, contributes little to project, listens to music, is constantly distracted. They grow together as they tackle this obstacle of a physics project and overcome their differences. Quirky, funny, and cheesy. Reminds many viewers of The Breakfast Club while giving off strong Lemonade Mouth vibes. Our vision was for the film to look very visually appealing, with beautiful lighting, interesting shots, and a plot that works. I had fun doing a long dolly shot as part of the montage scene in the second act.