How to make it seamless

How do you create an hour-long documentary (on a historical subject) without voice-over?

You interview for emotion. Your emotion-rich soundbites become your bricks. You wait until the end of production to get the last couple of interviews you need to cement the bricks in place.

Producer-director Mark Fastoso, associate producer Luis Blandon and myself crafted an hour-long doc on one American family's POW experience during the Vietnam era. Produced for Alabama Public Television, JEREMIAH is built out of interviews with six of the late Jeremiah Denton's children, three of his fellow POWs in Hanoi, one civilian colleague, and two historians.

To hold the audience close to the story, we didn't want a lick of VO or a line of on-screen text.

We cut and pasted a sequence of emotion-rich soundbites from the people who lived the story. We targeted what was missing--context and transition--then did two final interviews with historians Alvin Townley and Heath Lee. They provided the connective tissue. Seamless. No VO needed.

See for yourself if you think we got it.

JEREMIAH was screened last week before an audience of 300 at Atlanta's Woodruff Arts Center.