Zenith

The Zenith project is a way to showcase a talent we have mastered or are proud of. The word zenith means peak, and as our last major project at Freestyle, this represents our metaphorical peak.

For my Zenith, I created a mockumentary with a fellow freestyle film student Nick Fletcher. I love to edit long comedic dialogue scenes and a mockumentary was a great way to display this. We had such great actors that just amplified the comedic aspect 200%. With a mockumentary comes a lot of directing on set. As the dialogue is supposed to be natural and improved, it takes a lot of direction to get the content you need.

I think this project was a challenge for my mental strength. I faced a lot more challenges than I expected going into this project, like commitment and managing time. At the beginning of this project when we all pitched our ideas, I started off with a reality TV show parody. It was going to be very similar to “Real Housewives” and all those shows but it was going to be high school students. I had such big ideas for it and I didn’t use my pre-production as well as I wanted to. It ended up being a lot harder than expected to get 5 actors together during college acceptances and spring break. I ended up waiting way too long to bail on this idea as I just kept on trying and failing. I ended up partnering with Nick who was also projectless at the time. We ended up making a mockumentary together in a very short amount of time which was very stressful but I enjoyed and learned a lot from the whole process.

I started my Zenith project with a very different concept than what I ended up with.  Through many complications, I ended up switching my original idea very late into the process which caused a very stressful couple of days.  At the beginning of this project, I wanted to create a short TV episode that was heavily influenced by reality TV. Personally, I think a lot of reality TV shows are stupid and filled with a bunch of fake and staged drama, yet I am a huge fan of a lot of them and am an avid watcher.  I am a huge fan of The Bachelor and got the idea to mimic this style of TV as the season finale was around the same time we had to start thinking about Zenith. I also really enjoy Jimmy Tatro’s short series, Real Bros of Simi Valley, which is a parody on The Real Housewives series.  I was going to film a single episode from a made up series called The Real Students of Los Altos.  It was going to follow 5 students in high school planning a surprise birthday party with stupid, over-the-top drama.  I finished the pre-production process with a pretty thorough character list with props and sets. Looking back at this, I definitely was super excited throughout this process as I ended up with a lot more work on my hands than I had intended for.  I hit multiple road bumps and didn’t realize how taxing it would be to organize dates where everyone was free. I kept on canceling shooting dates week after week until I had stacked up all my work for just a couple weeks. At this point, I had become extremely demoralized and gave up on the project altogether.  I spent a long time trying to make a new project but still felt no hope. Finally, a week before it was due, I realized I couldn’t run from my problems and I needed to take them head on. I talked to my teacher about my issue and linked up with another classmate who had also not started his project. This classmate I got paired up with also happened to be a really close friend and it wasn’t our first time working together so collaborating together was very easy.  We quickly decided we were going to do a Vice News mockumentary on people who believed in aliens. We filmed and edited the project in about 5 days. I did not get much sleep throughout it but we got a final product we thought was funny. Although this wasn’t my best work, I still learned a lot from the process and am proud of what I created. Zenith has taught me many valuable life skills, like the importance of time management and perseverance. I realize now why the pre-production phase is so important.  It’s the basis for an entire project. Without that, there is nothing to build off of and that causes a lot of flaws in your plan. I think I came into this project with bigger ideas than I should’ve. Having to schedule 5 people to shoot together with crew during college acceptance visits and spring break was a very difficult task that kept on failing. And my script relied on improv so I needed specific actors who I knew would play the part well. In the end, I felt really comfortable switching to a mockumentary.  In our research paper we did earlier in the year, I decided to focus on comedy and actually studied a mockumentary series by Jimmy Tatro. I am a big fan of comedy and have created mostly comedy based projects. The research I did taught me a lot about stand up. I learned the different styles and watched different stand up comedians. I learned a lot about improv and how some can just go off the top of their head. This style of comedy is very natural and feels more fluid in a comedic film. I prefer this rather than someone reading a joke off a piece of paper as the cadence and flow are different.  It also leads to hilarious and unexpected moments. Finding this passion for improv led to creating a mockumentary for the comedy unit as well. This was when Nick and I first tried an improv style interview session. We both fell in love with the result and this influenced to create a newer, more polished version for our Zenith. If I could go back and do my Zenith over again, I’d definitely start my project sooner and commit to one. I think I put too much pressure on myself to make something amazing when I should’ve been focusing on something I would’ve had fun doing.