When I first began working on "In Another Life" in 1998, I was a relatively inexperienced video editor. At that point I made a decision that would set the direction for the entire piece--I decided to structure the program around the interviews, rather than around a script. I made this decision, at the time, because I had a gut feeling that building it on the interviews was more authentic, and in hindsight I think that's true. If you are trying to educate the audience about a subject they don't initially believe in, and you do it via narration, then you are trying to convince them, essentially, with an essay written by yourself. You are not letting your evidence speak for itself. In the case of reincarnation, most of the evidence--most of what I could actually show the audience--is the interviewees themselves. If I hang the presentation on a narration, allowing the interviewees to "pop in" and "pop out" as per the style that's currently popular, I am embellishing my narration--my "lecture"--with sound bites. It may be effective, but it's not as authentic. Such a presentation makes a viewer feel convinced for as long as the presentation lasts, but then the effect wears off, because, "who is the narrator that I should believe him?"

If, however, you let the interviewees speak for themselves, using the narration to tie one element to the next and create a flow, then the viewer must come to grips with the people he has vicariously met through the presentation. And this will eat at the back of his mind and require adjustment in his outlook, just as meeting any person will require such adjustments.

What I was too naive, as a filmmaker, to realize at the time I made this crucial decision, is that the style I was contemplating is very difficult. If you don't have enough visual images to cover the interviews, the entire program will be criticized as being "too much talking heads," and will be perceived as being amateurish. And this is exactly what happened.

There were three reasons why I couldn't find as many supporting visuals as I'd ideally have liked:
1) First, reincarnation is inherently difficult to show visually. We don't know exactly what it looks like. I was able to find one image which I thought conveyed the overall concept, and I was able to create a few animations which illustrated specific aspects.
2) Secondly, very little funding was forthcoming. That meant that I was limited in my ability to travel. Some documentaries travel to India or to Europe to show a person in their past-life setting--I had one small donation to fly to Maryland and Pennsylvania, and I scraped up enough on my own to travel to Alexandria and Virginia Beach. (In Virginia Beach, I realized I was almost flat broke and had to rush home to address the practical matter of financial survival!) I had no extra funds to help convince people to cooperate or to impress them (you know, offering to take people to dinner at a nice restaurant, flying over to meet with them, offering a couple hundred dollars for copyright permission, that sort of thing). I was unable to afford to film re-enactments except for the most simple type, and unable to pay for either animation or illustration. I was able to do some simple animations myself; and, though it was like pulling teeth, I was able to arrange for a few donated illustrations.
3) It was extremely difficult to get copyright permission for images, either because people rejected the entire concept of reincarnation, or because people were protecting their own conceptual "turf" for some reason.

However, by this time I had made a commitment to building the program around the interviews. Had I tried to start over by writing a narration, I would have found I needed even more visuals. Until you edit a documentary, you have no idea just how many visual images are required to cover a narration. Watch a Ken Burns documentary, and for ten minutes, keep a tab of how many different photographs are used. You will quickly tire of the exercise. Multiply that by 6 for an hour-long program (allowing for some duplicates), and you will see that this kind of documentary requires an image every 4-5 seconds, or 12 images per minute, times 60 = 720, minus the time taken for the interviews themselves. So maybe 400-500 images, roughly.

There are not 500 images relating to reincarnation. Since I had almost no money for travel, and no money for re-enactments, and no money for illustrations, and the animations were done with an inexpensive program and I didn't want to advertise that by overusing them, and to top it off it was like pulling teeth to get photograph permissions even from those sources who were supposed to be on my side, there was no way I was going to come up with enough visual images to cover a narration-based program.

What is normally done these days in this situation, is to fill in the blanks with special effects. This is the practical reason behind much of the special effects you see in documentaries these days, such as the one I saw last night (as I write this) about UFO's on the History Channel. This is why you see something vaguely related to the narration with rippled distortions, weird lights, slow motion, and every other button in the editing program of choice thrown in, repeatedly ad nasuem throughout the entire program. That, and to keep the viewer artificially interested.

I have always fallen a bit behind other editors--especially younger ones--as regards my special effects expertise. I am sure I would have been fascinated by this modern capability when I was in my teens, since I was interested in such things even before the age of computers. I am catching up and am learning to use them. However, there was a philosophical reason why I didn't want to over-rely on special effects for "In Another Life." I don't view reincarnation as spooky. I view it as natural and mysterious. There's a difference. This is why I chose to use nature footage to represent reincarnation concepts rather than knock-your-socks-off weird special effects. Nature is mysterious and elegant and--well--natural. I wanted this to be taken seriously--I didn't want to create the equivalent of a carnival thrill ride.

That meant that (although I didn't think all this through until later) I didn't have available to me this last, final "save" of using copious special effects, to compensate for the lack of visual images.

So, what I did was to fine-tune the editing of the interviews to a "gnat's knee"--I kept working with them and paring them down until I had exactly the footage I wanted, no more and no less. I added the images I could get permission for so that they broke up the "talking heads" problem as much as possible. On the practical side, there were many "jump cuts" I had to cover with those visuals, so where I used them was often dictated by this necessity. If someone "hemmed or hawed" or paused or repeated themselves in the interview, I cut these portions out so that the interviews flowed better and kept the viewer's interest--and, of course, these cuts had to be covered, further reducing my precious supply of available images.

There are two brief scenes of children in "In Another Life." You have no idea how difficult it is to get permission to include footage of someone's child in a documentary about reincarnation. I am indebted to the parents of both children. The re-enacted scene of the palm reader used two aspiring actresses, who probably wish they hadn't volunteered; two friends to "stand in line"; and a friend to donate his rather expansive home that I could dress up to look like the outdoor patio of a restaurant. It cost, as I recall, about $40 in restaurant supplies, and you will probably think it's pitiful but $40 was no small amount of money for me at that time. I had to be careful just how many such $40-expenditures I made, since most of it was coming out of my own pocket. Shooting full-blown re-enactments with paid actors, sets and a full crew was out of reach.

I think that, given all these constraints, I created a pretty credible documentary. It's not done in the modern style, but it's strong and clean and keeps the attention of any viewer who is sincerely interested in the topic. What it will not do, is artificially hold the attention of someone who is unconsciously or consciously resisting the topic. And this is, perhaps, the "kiss of death" for it commercially. Ninety-percent of the broadcasters, distributors, and film festival judges who reviewed it, were probably resistant to the topic of reincarnation itself. That means that by definition the film didn't engage them. They never got pulled into it emotionally because they were too busy inwardly pronouncing it nonsense (or feeling threatened by it), and hence, for them, the on-screen interviews dragged. For them, every amateurish touch stood out like a sore thumb (I have since eliminated most of them in 3-4 rounds of revisions). But the power of the content itself threatened them. So they were hit with this "double-whammy"--powerful, threatening content, along with flaws that made an all-too-easy target to criticize. (You will immediately see that this reaction was made almost inevitable by the prejudice that manifested in lack of financial support at the outset of the project--those who refused to fund it out of prejudice, were withholding what it would normally have taken to make it professional enough to avoid being an easy target for prejudice at the evaluation stage. Through sheer perseverance and innovation, I was able to overcome a significant portion of the handicap, creating a broadcastable, if unorthodox, program.)

This, to my mind, explains the very strange reactions I got--a kind of nervous pronouncement that it was "too much talking heads" or "pseudo-science" or just that it was too difficult to promote individual programs, or just a condescending suggestion that it wasn't worthy of serious consideration without being specific as to why. It also explains why some people received it with great enthusiasm--those were the people who were not inherently resistant to the topic, and hence, they had been pulled into the interviews instead of bored by them, and they had experienced the energy and artistic merit of the film that I had so painstakingly put into it, despite all the constraints I was forced to work under.

Anyway, this is all explanation after-the-fact. It was after watching the UFO program on the History Channel last night, that I had the whim to explain these issues, because I think that most people who view documentaries but don't have the opportunity to create them, don't understand why these trends exist.

--Stephen S.