How This Documentary Filmmaker Got Immersed in a World

Written by Jon Ornoy

It’s funny how little choices you make in a time and place that seem inconsequential and end up having huge impacts on your life.

Back in 2019, when I happened to see an ad for a run of shows that two-time world champion magician Shawn Farquhar was hosting in my hometown of Vancouver and decided it would be a fun thing to do for my birthday. There’s no way that I could’ve guessed back then how just how profoundly that impulse would shape the last five years of my life, but I’m so happy that it did. I’d seen Shawn on TV before, but there’s something entirely different about having all of these incredible, impossible things happening right in front of your face, especially when he seems just as amazed by what’s happening as you are, so, emboldened, I reached out to him a few days later to invite him for a drink. The rest is history.

I didn’t have any big expectations for where these initial meetings were going to go, but the opportunity to pick the brain of one of the best magicians in the world was one I wasn’t going to pass up and somehow it all culminated in our recently completed feature documentary called Lost in the Shuffle.

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As a fourth-generation magician who was immersed in the art from an early age, Shawn’s route to this collaboration couldn’t be further from my own and I think it’s summed up well in a stock story he likes to tell about how his parents taught him to count from a deck of cards. Cards have always been a huge part of his life and despite now owning upwards of 4,000 decks, I find it really interesting that he’d always just looked at them as tools without ever considering their origins, or why they look like they do. That all changed a few years ago, when while on a down day during a tour in France, he did some sightseeing in the Loire Valley and ended up at the Château D’Amboise, a castle that dates back to the 10th century. While wandering its ancient corridors he noticed a familiar symbol, one that he couldn’t place at first, but when he came to realise that he knew it from the King of Hearts, it made him wonder if there was a connection between the two.

Traditionally, the KH is thought to commemorate the emperor Charlemagne, but Shawn contends that the card is actually meant to represent the lesser-known King Charles VIII, who died at his ancestral home in Amboise in 1498 after a brief and unremarkable reign. While the history books will tell us that Charles died as the result of an innocent accident, Shawn believes that he actually he met his demise at the hands of his wife Queen Anne and that the truth of this cold-case murder was encoded in the playing cards of the day to make the story accessible at a time when most people couldn’t read. Given that the court cards in today’s standard poker decks have a direct lineage to these original French designs, the idea that the clues to this centuries-old cold case murder may have been lying in plain sight for all this time, was an intoxicating hook that immediately grabbed my imagination, and the rest of the film fell quickly into place.

Backed partially by a very successful crowdfunding campaign in 2021 that saw us hit almost 300 percent of our original target, we hit the road in March of 2023 and ended up logging around 27,000km through ten cities in six countries. Our road crew consisted of myself, Shawn, producer Ana Carrizales, DP Collin Morrison and Sound Mixer Alex Shamku and we traveled with two RED Komodo Dragons, our lens kit, an EasyRig and Alex’s sound package (which was always fun explaining to airport security). Along the way, we hired local grip/electrics who would bring with them the lighting gear needed for each particular location, as well as the occasional translator if it was required for an interview.

Given the potential challenges of picking up day calls this way, I was really pleased by how well we gelled with the local hires and the quality of crew that we were able to find on Facebook. This was especially true of our camera assistants who were tasked with keeping our magic performances sharp despite having no rehearsals or real idea of what was going to transpire, and that really saved us in the edit room later on. We faced our share of hurdles on the way, from spontaneously cancelled flights, to a teleprompter that I’d shipped ahead to our final location simply not arriving (we tried to hack one together using my laptop and piece of glass from a picture frame, but, spoiler alert, it kind of sucked), but we overcame everything as a team and I really appreciated how invested the crew were and their willingness to step up and do whatever it took to make our days.

‘Lost in the Shuffle’ Behind the Scenes

Post-production took about nine months and split my attention between working with Elad Tzadok on our picture cut, while also partnering with Jesters Animation on four animated sequences that are peppered through the film. I’d never worked in animation before and it was really fun to try on that process on for size and seeing how Jesse and Brad brought my ideas to life, particularly because I’d challenged them to develop unique styles for each sequence. The picture cut was interesting as well because I didn’t expect us to end up deviating so much from my original treatment, because ideas that had flowed well on the page, didn’t seem to work as well when we were working with the actual footage. We finished the film in February 2024, just in time to get in our application to Hot Docs, which I always knew was where I wanted the film to premiere, and so I was thrilled when they eventually extended that invitation.

It’s nice to think that once you’ve finished the film the hard work is over, but I don’t think my hours got much shorter from the time we delivered to when we landed on VOD platforms at the beginning of September; I just had to put on a different hat. Finding our distribution partners was one big part of that, but having retained my theatrical and non-theatrical rights, it was the planning and implementation of that release that took the bulk of my time.

I planned a seven city North American tour that would see Shawn and I play two nights each in San Francisco, LA, Vancouver, Toronto, New York, Dallas, and Chicago, bundling the film with a live performance from Shawn and a Q&A with both of us. During the time we were touring, the film also played a number of other magic theaters and indie cinemas across the US, often with another magician as an opener and Shawn and I Zoom-ing in for a Q&A after the film, so in the end we had about 30 live venues. I think that in the end we’ll have maybe made half our money back on these dates, but I always regarded the tour as our marketing campaign to generate word of mouth for the VOD release and beyond, so I’m pretty pleased with the results. I think that this part of the process is maybe where I learned the most, so here are a few takeaways:

·Not all distributors are evil leeches, but in the changing media landscape I don’t think it makes any sense to give one company all of your rights. There are some things that they’ll do better and some things that you will, but no one is going to care as much about the film as you do.

·We only had to four-wall one venue out of the 30 we played, everyone else agreed to doing 50/50 rev shares. This was a huge surprise to me, I didn’t realize that you could just cold email theaters and ask them to play your movie. It’s a very time-consuming process and I probably contacted at least 300 cinemas to get the hits I did (cinematreasures.org is a great resource), but it cost me almost nothing to send them the film and without a rental fee to pay, even if we didn’t manage to draw a lot of people, anything we took in was profit.

·Not many documentaries can merchandise themselves, we were one of the fortunate few, and we’d totally sold out of everything by the time the tour was done. It’s a great little revenue stream if you can make it work for you and you don’t have to have superhero franchise to make it happen.

‘Lost in the Shuffle’ Behind the Scenes

·Make sure you have money set aside for marketing! What’s the point of making your great film if no one knows it exists? I had this in mind throughout the process, but still didn’t do a good enough job of putting it into practice and really lucked out when my post-production studio came in as an investor, allowing me to use the money I’d earmarked for that work into the marketing instead. I will not make that mistake with the next one and will aim to have 5-10% of the budget set aside for the sales phase.

I love the opportunity that documentary filmmaking gives you to immerse yourself in a world and my time with the magic community has been great, but I’m already excited to see what opportunities will unfold next.

Lost in the Shuffle is now available to buy or rent from iTunes or wherever you get your movies, check us out at lostintheshuffle.film to learn more.