Documentary Plan

For this block's assignment we've been asked to pitch and create an observational documentary, with the brief, "it can be easy to rush through life without stopping to notice much." This phrase to me brought to mine the pagan mentality of connecting with nature through observation and foraging. Alice Tarbuck in her book A Spell in the Wild goes through each month of the year and gives a brief history of witchcraft and its seasonal practices, including the holidays, the changes in nature through the seasons, and how one can connect themselves to this through observance, food, and spells. 

For my documentary I will be using her guidance in this book as a going off point for the observance I will be doing. I plan to follow this advice in my own life and put together a documentary that shows the changing of the seasons from summer to winter through a pagan lens. I will also be filming the spells she suggests, and showing the materials she uses, both as documentation and as art. I will be taking further notes and planning this out in more detail tomorrow. 

As well as general interest in these practices, a well as accessibility (Tarbuck states that witchcraft should not be gate kept due to lack of fancy resources or materials), I've also chosen this topic for a documentary as a more abstract observation like this will open up the opportunity for experimentation in sound design, something that I haven't done before and have mentioned previously I've been meaning to try. My experience so far with sound design has just been with music, and the most advanced thing I've tried is making a voice sound like it was over a loudspeaker with a helicopter in the background. These turned out quite well but I'd like to expand my skills to more experimental forms of this with more layers of sound and nuance.

I'm also planning on doing a tarot reading for the month and filming that, as well as maybe including some small animations. My only issue with including animation is I don't want to take away from the documentary style by adding them in, so I plan to only include them sparingly and as enhancement rather than as a prominent feature.

I've already gone around my neighbourhood and recorded ambient sounds, which I plan to mix with other found sounds from the internet as well as readings from extracts of the book. I'm also planning to play with colorgrading a bit more than I previously have.