Documentary films are in-depth, informative resources that bring important topics forward in captivating ways for audiences to engage with these films. Not only do they provide an opportunity to connect and understand the world a little bit better, but they open the opportunity for debates regarding these topics and help bring by bringing people together. Having this thought of documentaries in mind, upon receiving the task, my teammates, Callum wood, Issac Jallal Capulet and myself started brainstorming ideas of interesting topics to be discussed and put together in an engaging documentary. As I have always been curious about the obscure and spiritual world, yet a little bit of a sceptic about the topic of divination, and this seemed like the perfect excuse to explore that mystical world. In order to broaden down our search, we desired to focus on tarot cards and how they work as a form of fortune-telling. After doing some research on the topic of mediums and clairvoyants, we came across the friendly Paul Hughes-Barlow, AKA Paul Maharaj, a Tarot Card reader and clairvoyant, making a living by telling peoples fortunes through the art of divination. He keeps doing business in his tiny office (emphasis in tiny), right next to/under the Brighton Pier, that despite the size has a certain charm to it. The idea for ‘The Brighton Pier’s Psychic Medium’ documentary was based on Paul and he was of working with the art and what tarot cards mean to him. After exchanging a couple of e-mails between each other, explaining what the video was for, he agreed to be part of our documentary and enlighten us with some readings. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to create an interesting and engaging documentary about a topic that a lot of people know to exist but do not fully understand yet.
As smoothly as the production on this informative documentary ran, as a group we encountered several obstacles that we had to solve to accomplish the task of creating this short documentary film. In any sort of production, one must be prepared for problems that might arise when filming or editing. As a group in order to avoid these problems, we arranged a meeting with Paul before filming to access the space that we were working with, and what equipment would be needed to achieve the best result on our documentary. On the day of meeting Paul, we arrived at the Brighton Pier, walked down to the small, dark, tucked in cave that was his office, and finally got to meet face to face. Paul walked out of his office and took all three of us into the smallest room to rent I have ever been into, in my entire life. The square space only had three chairs, two tables and was decorated to the top with mystical figurines and images of Jesus and Buddha all up to display. As small as the room was, the charming little square made the four of us just feel a bit closer, yet this is where we faced one of our incidents. The small room had no source of natural light, it consisted of a brick cube, that was only lit by a light on the ceiling. Due to the space of the room, light equipment was our main concern since there was nothing else that could fit in that room apart from the four of us, a microphone, two cameras and maybe, one more Jesus figurine. After meeting with Paul, and getting to know him s bit better, we got an idea of where the documentary could go in regards to the flow of questions. We saw the room that we were going to have to work in, we arranged a different day that was available to him to proceed with the filming of the documentary, and started working on what questions to ask Paul in regards to tarot card readings. As a group, we had to properly plan what we were going to do regarding the lighting situation of the room and the equipment that we could take with us.
The lights that were available at the time of filming were too big and hot to fit inside the minuscule room, and we had to work with the lighting situation that we were dealt with. When the day of the shoot arrived, we had not managed to obtain any lights to the with the situation. Because of this, we decided to be very cautious when filming the footage and were extra careful about exposure adjustments and camera angles. For filming, we used two cameras to have backup footage as well as extra shots and one microphone the get the best audio quality we possibly could. While filming, I took some of the shoots, as well as close-ups of the setting of the room, while Issac was using another camera to get a different angle of the interview. We did this because we were aware that the lighting situation might not be the best, and thought that having extra footage could make it up, in case some shoots from one of the comers don’t work too well.
When it came to putting the documentary together I took the job as editor of the documentary. Before putting the sequence together I listened to the sound recording and edited the audio so that instead of being an answer and question, formal type of documentary, it had the feeling of a more narrative type of documentary. In my job as an editor is where I encountered another issue that I had to resolve in order to progress forwards with the project. In the audio file, there were certain parts where the muffling sound of clothes or the clicking of the camera recording button were very noticeable, in the end, result, some of these sounds would cut off important parts in Paul’s statements. To work through this issue, I took out the loudest muffling sounds and tried to fill them in with the camera microphone, I adjusted the pitches and the volume to match the audio together. This was the first idea that I had to fix the issue with the sound quality but that did not work as the sound from the built-in camera was too low in comparison to the recorder and the pitch of the words were too different from one to another, making it sound far away and then very close.
The second solution that I had for this was to go through the audio file again, since there was more than forty-five minutes worth of conversation and to find other interesting points that Paul had to make about Tarot card reading and his personal experience, not only reading for other people but in learning about this method of divination. When I found other parts of the interview that would work for the final piece of the documentary, I pieced together the final audio that would be the base for the visual aspect of the project. After finalizing, I went through the footage that we had filmed and realized that in some of the clips the exposure was very low, making everything seem darker than what it was. When adjusting the exposure and contrast of the shots, the footage was losing quality and becoming very grainy. Some of the shots that we had of Paul dealing the card were too dark to see the symbols written on them, making the footage obsolete. Some of the shots were able to be saved by the fact that there was a backup camera shooting the same scene from a different angle, giving not only a different angle (literally) but also helping to fill in the footage that was not able to be saved in post-production. Despite being able to save some of the shots, some were not able to be used. In this case, I decided to use footage taken from outside the office and around the Brighton pier. Using this footage to fill In space also helped the documentary not seem so stale, just showing a guy, shuffling some cards and explaining them to you. The use of this footage along the different camera angles and b roll were the solutions to fix these issues that could happen during production.
Inputting together the final piece of work, some shots could not be recuperated and had to be regarded as useless at the end of the day. Working around these issues and exploring different ways of solving the problems that could arise in production in the future, helped me gain insight into different ways to solve these kinds of issues if they ever come in the future. Despite these critical incidents that we encountered in regards to the audio and the visual aspects of the documentary, in the magic of post-production, these issues were able be resolved to achieve a satisfactory ending result.
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