By Ken Sheetz
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With a couple of days until Patrick was ready to film again, I had time to dive into the edit. I sat down at the desk of my humble Best Western hotel room in Cottonwood, Arizona—nothing glamorous, just the necessary quiet space to focus.
I had two hours of green screen footage with Patrick, which, by my favorite 10-to-1 ratio, meant I had enough gold for about twenty minutes of polished content—two strong videos if I played it right.
First step: find the emotional and philosophical heartbeat of The Flanagan Experiments. I skimmed the footage, listening not just for clarity but for inspiration. And there it was—Patrick riffing on vibration. How the entire universe, at its core, is nothing but waves and resonance.
That became my opening theme.
Unlike my narrative film work, where I write lines for fictional characters, in documentary film you write with the voice of your subject. You shape, not script. And Patrick Flanagan was, and remains, the most fascinating subject I’ve ever worked with. Ten years before AI, it was just me, Final Cut Pro, and Patrick’s voice—guiding me.
I pulled vibrant cosmic stock clips from StoryBlocks and sound design from AudioBlocks. Patrick spoke with deliberate slowness, a rhythm he explained was the result of overcoming a childhood stutter. That rhythm carried his intelligence like a steady drumbeat—but I trimmed some of the longer pauses so the ideas could land for a lay audience without losing the soul of his delivery.
Every frame I adjusted, every thought I rearranged, felt like a sculptor tapping into marble and revealing something sacred truth underneath. I upgraded the green screen look with a plugin, layered in footage of stars and DNA spirals, and began to build a bin system for Patrick’s mental cosmos—topics like the pineal gland, vibrational medicine, and his central belief: that the universe is within us.
The more I edited, the more I listened. And the more I listened, the smarter I felt. Pat had that effect.
The next day, I let it all simmer.
I made the short drive to Sedona and returned to the Amitabha Stupa and Peace Park—one of my favorite spiritual spots from my last journey through there, just before departing to Antarctica to film The Coolest Meditation Ever: Antarctica 12.12.12. The energy of that sacred ground helped me reset and reconnect. I’d uploaded a rough cut of the Human Flight segment to YouTube so I could review it on my Android. I listened there beneath the red rocks, watching clouds drift overhead, Pat’s voice rising in my earbuds like a calm wind.
His tone was quiet, yet resonant. Magnetic. As I walked, I began to imagine how to score the video—what music would elevate his words without overpowering them. Something that moved like a current beneath revelation as the words THE FLANAGAN EXPERIMENTS in the spiritual yet masculine looking type-style Herculaneum embodies.
Back at the motel, I worked deep into the night.
Although this was a 50-video series, I knew the first few episodes would set the tone for everything—and I also knew how much that mattered to Pat, to the fans waiting, and to Stephanie, who was still angry he had made the deal with me without looping her in. That weighed on me. I wanted her to see the love and care going into every frame.
I kept returning to one extraordinary thing Patrick said mid-interview that had struck me on set:
“In the not too distant future, humanity will have full-on telepathic abilities. We’ll be able to levitate… even fly through the air at will.”
I paused when I heard that again. Goosebumps. It wasn’t just bold—it was prophetic.
I remembered a shot I’d seen on StoryBlocks: a still image high above the clouds, with the curve of the Earth bending gently in the distance. That’s where I placed Patrick—behind his desk in the clouds, a scientist perched on the edge of tomorrow.
I closed my laptop.
The future had arrived. And it spoke in the voice of Patrick Flanagan.
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