Introduction

Alright. This is kind of a weird one.

The zenith project was sort of a culmination of whatever we wanted to focus on at the end of the year. As an added bonus, it was a way to wriggle out of any sort of senior thesis project. In fact, we’ve written very little for English this semester, which is nice for my tired little brain. I suppose our research paper last semester essentially served that purpose anyway. I’m still very proud of that. It’s still the apex of my high school career, academically speaking. Or, should I say, the zenith of my academic high school career (sorry zenith project, but this Breaking Bad paper has you beat). Feel free to check it out.

But all that aside, and more to the point: the zenith project was a choose-your-own-adventure project where everything is made up and the points don’t matter (actually it was a significant chunk of our grade). We set our own deadlines, schedules, and goals to be self-sufficient and make the project wholly our own. Or at least we tried to.

My zenith project was rocky indeed, which I will explain in the “Process” section, where I will also outline what my project was and how it all went down. But before that, here’s my reflection for English on the project— the majority of it was written shortly (or relatively shortly) after the project’s due date, at which point I was still in the middle of recording and editing.

Process

I’ll try my best not to simply rehash what I wrote in the reflection here.

Senior Narrative was not a great experience for me. There were many reasons for that, but by the time it was over, my partner and I both just wanted to move on and forget all about it. What the whole experience taught me, however, is that there are parts of film production I like far more than I would have expected to. My reflections project had already taught me how much better I was at wielding a camera than I had previously thought. Senior Narrative, however, taught me how much I loved shooting actors (goddamn that was bad word choice on my part) and designing the frame and shotlist. I loved physically holding the camera, twisting the aperture and shutter speed randomly until it looked good, planning dynamic shots that would be too difficult to effectively accomplish in real life… all that jazz.

I must say, however, that I do not really like reaching out to people. That’s not because I hate people, believe it or not, but just because I’m not good at that. It gets overwhelming and uncomfortable to actively reach out to and work with others for me. And while that’s certainly an issue that I do need to work on one day, I figured now was not that time. I felt that I did the last semester of high school dirty so far and wanted to make it easier on myself at the end.

So I played to my strengths instead of challenging my weaknesses to try and go out with a bang. I cast two of my best friends (who had actually ended up in my senior narrative) in the film and planned to write the script around them. I’m not sure they actually knew they were asked, since they had both offered to help out previously, but I don’t know if I really told them. Didn’t matter anyway because the greater powers of divine fate made me fire them maybe, before I even hired them.

I have never been good at doing those elevator pitches in film. I come up with what I’m going to say just hours before class because I can’t conjure up any ideas. I was pretty sure I wanted to center my film around creative shot design, though I had trouble coming up with a narrative for it. My narrative ended up being centered around that itself. Just two guys who come across a “film board”, which was just a board with knobs and dials and sliders that would adjust things like tone, color palette, creativity, pacing, lighting, and stuff like that. People responded better to my idea than I did myself. So I carried forward with it.

I was very slow to get my feet off the ground. We created schedules for ourselves and I immediately fell behind and didn’t get everything in for my first checkpoint. I don’t know what motivated me to get to work, but by the beginning of the second week I was back on track and began writing my script. I still have it here for you to read. It revolved around a company that would connect toaster manufacturers to toaster consumers.

It gets a little meta as it goes on and in a way that’s a little tacky. Eventually I think one of them was going to kill the other as they fought over the film board, and one of them was going to destroy it or something. I never really decided, since I made the intentional decision to stop working very hard on my project and wasn’t going to meet the deadlines for my next check-in on March 20th. Because there was no more school on March 20th.

So, yes, I, like many others, realized that I was not going to be able to do the zenith project I was planning to. I was also not in the mood to do anything and secretly hoped zenith would become an optional project. Two weeks passed until school began once more at the end of March. At that point we were obviously given the option to revise our zenith projects, but I had no idea what to do. I wanted to create interesting shots but I didn’t have any kind of narrative to use. But there’s that whole “write what you know” thing, so I considered doing a mocumentary about shelter-in-place that might teeter into insanity (completely inspired by The Lighthouse) and experimental abstract film. But I didn’t know how to approach abstract film and I really had it in my head that I needed to make it something creative and unique. It couldn’t be dumb and simple. But I got nowhere with that in my head so I ended up settling for the mocumentary idea, without the abstract film, no matter how dumb and simple it may end up.

So at that point I created the new schedule and planned to get a bunch of my planning and possibly a significant chunk of my filming done over April break (which wasn’t really much different from not-April break). But surprise surprise, apathy didn’t exactly go away and I didn’t end up doing anything at all. Well, no, I believe I wrote half a page, but I didn’t like what I wrote and never got any further. So two weeks passed and we were now over halfway through April, steadily approaching that May 6th deadline. I wasn’t satisfied with how much of it felt unoriginal or stupid to me. I still was clinging onto the idea that the narrative had to have meaning or be special. After the guilty check-in that week I got pushed back on track and ready to go.

But guess what? One more week passed and I had still not begun work. I was completely lost on this project at that point and didn’t know what to do about it. Somehow, by the end of that week, I had actually gotten on track and broke ground on filming as of April 25th. I was pretty sure I could get this done in time though.

Well, I didn’t, really. I pulled an all-nighter backing up to the deadline in which I left my project off in an unfinished state, promising to complete it within the next month. And that was because during the previous night, I had filmed some mocumentary interview clips, but also done overdubbing of sound effects for the two main scenes in the film. What I found from doing that was that I actually really enjoyed the sound design and overdubbing. Actually, that was something that I was sad I didn’t get to do more of during Senior Narrative, so it was nice to get a shot at that.

Here’s my Zenith Celebration video from May 6th, recorded about half an hour before the deadline. I apologize for the low volume— you’re going to have to crank your volume up all the way to maximum to hear it, if you want to hear it. That’s just how it goes.

After that, the entire scope of my project had shifted over. I no longer wanted to do the mocumentary at all. I just wanted to do the sound overdubbing. Though in truth I wasn’t sure I wanted to do anything at all, and debated for a little while whether or not I would actually be completing this project like I promised, or if I’d turn in what I had and go with it.

I chose to work on more sound overdubbing. I wanted to focus on the two major scenes and syncing up every sound effect perfectly to artificially craft a coherent and believable scene. I also wanted to make sure every single sound I had was original, and nothing was downloaded from the internet.

I spent many days recording different sound effects I would need for the scenes, trimming down the fat within the 20-40 minutes I’d import into the timeline, and then lining them up to pick the most convincing one to use. It was a lot of work, and it would have been a lot less to have someone just hold a boom microphone. But where’s the fun in that?

It took a long time. It drove me to insanity getting it all completed. But eventually, on May 28th at 6:32 AM, the final project was exported and ready to go. And zenith was finally over.

Final Product

I hate to leave you hangin’ but my final project is not quite uploaded just yet. I shall be waiting. When it is, I will post it below.

 

I am proud of my final product, but it does retain various flaws. For one, I found that there weren’t enough takes of my first pass of interview overdubs to work, so I did another at the very end. Turns out I didn’t record those audio clips particularly well and they were really low in quality. It sucked because the old clips were really high quality, but they weren’t sufficient, and using both the old and new audio side by side would be jarring and highlight the latter’s crummy quality. So I had to throw out the old ones, for the most part (I still used them for the outdoor scene). I was frustrated and kept adding different audio effects to try and make it work, and eventually settled with what I felt was the best I’d get. Because at the end of the day, I didn’t even care about the mocumentary part anymore— I just cared about the black market scene and the garden scene. The rest was just fluff to add context, and I didn’t want to focus on it. It didn’t have to be perfect; it just had to be done.

I wish I’d spent more time mixing as well. I breezed over a lot of that because I needed to get that project in as soon as humanly possible. I think I did a decent job, but there’s a lot I wanted to do that I didn’t end up doing. Especially involving different subtle reverb and effective panning to create much more depth in the scene.

Many, many audio effects were recorded that you might not think about. For example: different rounds of footsteps, slight movements in a body shifting position, the hum of a refrigerator in the garage, and many takes of birds chirping in various trees.

One of the coolest aspects of the project was Frankenstein-ing clips together. I’m no stranger to that— I did a lot of that in my senior narrative, as well as many in the past before that as well. It’s a very creative solution I don’t hear people talk about often. Maybe because it’s a terrible idea. But it works so, so well. If one take of a shovel scrape has a more satisfying end than the other, but the other has a more satisfying start, you can just overlap them and adjust a crossfade until nobody would possibly be able to notice when it switches over. And as I can hardly ever choose between takes, I often end up doing this for the best of both worlds.

A lot of the overlapping audio clips aren’t even filmed at once. For instance, the bag tosses are usually one take for the throw and a separate for the landing— and in the case of one where a jar bounces out of the bag, the jar bouncing is two separate takes of me just sliding a jar across the ground. The squeak of the water tap turning on is a completely separate recording from the audio clip of the water coming out of the tap.

The Tesla sounds are completely disjointed and mashed together, with parking brakes being applied from separate clips, driving sounds fading in and out of existence, two separate overlapped audio bytes looping for the car’s “hum”, the sound of the window going up and down, and all that stuff. The claw sound effects are pulled from different audio clips to a ridiculous degree.

So, as a result, that was the final project of my Freestyle career. It wasn’t the most creative or original or perfect. It wasn’t even on time. But I found myself enjoying it and gaining new skills I didn’t really expect to gain. And no matter how much of the process was enjoyable, that doesn’t change the fact that any of it was enjoyable at all. And to put it simply, to enjoy things during these past few months has been very nice.

As I always like to brag about, here is my Adobe Premiere timeline gore. Any respectable filmmaker’s nightmare of chaos and insanity— a kind of chaos and insanity that I crave.

And that’s the end.