The choice to make main character Katherine mute for most of the film was a key choice to push the film beyond narrative and into gut-level experience. Although she is largely silent, Katherine was always written as a complex character; seemingly strong and aloof but also a vulnerable, awkward and lonely outsider.
One reason for the minimal dialogue and extensive use of visions and nature in the film is to very purposefully leave the narrative open to interpretation. Grief and spirituality are such personal experiences that the filmmakers wanted to give audiences the space for their own thoughts, feelings, beliefs and reactions. As such the film has been designed to be more visceral, raw, slow and beautiful than intellectual, rational, prescriptive or immediate.
Following earlier experiments with switching lenses on set, "The Silence After Life" took the documentary approach of sticking with a single zoom lens throughout production in order to maximise time with the actors. The film was shot in HD and was subsequently blown-up by 4% to 2K. 4K was avoided partly for budget but mainly for file size and processing time knowing that 2K resolution roughly equates to celluloid 35mm, that the perceptual difference between 2K and 4K resolution is relatively negligible and that the visual reference of Derek Jarman's Super 8 films were shot at a resolution far below 2K.
The film was always envisaged to have minimal dialogue, partly to enable a faster, simpler shoot and to utilise the director's existing sound and scoring skills but mainly because the nature of the grief, reflection and spirituality the film was trying to illustrate demanded it.
Although a newcomer to making features, the director had extensive experience of writing, producing, editing and releasing slow-change music (including ten years as a member of the underground ambient / drone band Rameses III) so a cinematic equivalent of this music seemed possible, if ambitious. "A Book of Silence" by Sara Maitland was a key inspiration for this film; her literary documentation of how the edges of the material world can blur and shimmer when she was faced with silence reflected his own personal experiences. The slowness, emptiness and loneliness of grief is depicted less often onscreen, particularly in terms of a spiritual reaction, so this felt like a subject worth tackling.