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The Rapture v1.5 from Maurice Vanderfeesten on Vimeo.

The Rapture; made by Pim Bokhorst, Felix van Veldhoven, Maurice Vanderfeesten; for Tweedagsfilm, made in two days. | Plot: an actual theme about a man who believes to go straight to heaven on Judgement Day.
( also on youtu.be/​zNom2YL3OHM )

Credits
Pim Bokhorst (actor)
Felix van Veldhoven (film maker)
Maurice Vanderfeesten (film maker)

Film plot (spoiler alert):
The film is about a decent man who lays his faith in the Christian doctrine. This doctrine tells him that everything people do on earth is just a prelude and preparation for the live in Heaven. Also the doctrine tells him that on Judgement Day his soul will be blessed and will come directly in heaven.
Since this is an actual theme these days, and we live in a parallel multiverse where the previous day, 21 May 2011, didn’t come to an Apocalypse, we thought to create our own.

What is Tweedagsfilm
Tweedagsfilm is a concept where one creates a film in 48hour. This includes idea development, collecting actors, location, scenario building, film shooting, editing, rendering.
Felix and I started Friday 27 May 2011 at 20:30 to start imagining what the film should be about. 48hours later on Sunday 20:30 the audience came in to see the freshly baked film.

Film making process

FRIDAY
Friday evening Felix and I had a brainstorm where this film should be about, and we came with the idea to film an event that had a lot of media attention these days: The day of eternal salvation.
After we had a rough idea, we tried to call several actors who might be interesting to cast the role of this person. After two or three calls Pim Bokhorst said he was available on Saturday.

SATURDAY
On Saturday morning we tried to fill in the scenario’s; thinking of what this person would do and take with him on the last day on earth. We have made a list of objects for the actor, a list of things we needed for the shooting the film at another location such as lights. Then we descided on the locations, inside the house, outside with the tent, and in the tent. And what should happen at these locations, what we roughly should shoot. The rest was improvisation on the locations itself.
During the shoot we were discussing and deciding what the audience would see. What the openshot would be etc.
Because we used just a simple digital handycam in Standard Definition, we used a lot of external light sources, 100W lightbulbs, and one 300W halogen construction light, to make the image as crisp as possible.

Actor:
The actor was very good! It was very pleasant to work with, he came with a lot of excellent improvisations, little details what made the person in the film very authentic.

Camera:
that is a Samsung small handy cam; drawback it compresses the 16:9 widescreen in a 4:3 format, so we shot everything in 4:3 for the sake of render time in the editing phase.

Editing:
We first selected the best clips and copied it on the harddisk of the notebook. The notebook is an dualcore intel with 4GB memory. We loaded the clips in Adobe Premiere CS4, and arranged them in the right order. We placed black bars on the top and the bottom to imitate a wide screen look. We were planning to use collor correcting filters, but left them out also for the sake to reduce render time, because we had a tight deadline the next day. and then it was 23:00 and went to sleep.

SUNDAY
On Sunday we started with clean cutting the scenes. The processor was working hard, because the MP4 format was really slow to work with. We had to wait a lot for the computer to respond. Even scrolling through a simple clip was a waiting game. -sigh- When we had made the clean cuts, we did some special things where the moving pictures shifted in the X and Y asis, as you have seen. Then we pressed the render button and had to wait for 43 minutes until all images were processed in an Adobe friendly format to work with. In the meantime we were looking for music and audio fragments that would go along with the film. After the rendering was completed we put the music under it and aligned the film to go with it. Then the audio foley fragments were put under it. Last we put in the Tiltles and the video transitions. Watched the result and rendered it for the last time. Now it is 19:30. We had one hour for exporting and encoding the film, before our audience should walk in at 20:30.
Then we had do make a screen for watching on a beamer and re-arange the room in cinema style.
Then it was 20:30, and the computer said it had to export for another hour. -sigh- Christian Tan, another film maker, showed the audience peices of his work and and gave some comments
Finaly 21:15 the film was ready to be shown to the audience that had gathered, waiting for the result.
An appause and Christian gave his very nice comments.

We hope you enjoy this film and would leave some nice comments too 🙂

Many thanks
Many thanks to the great audience for their cheers and comments.

Special thanks
Special thanks to Pim Bokhorst for his great great acting!
And special thanks to Judith Huisman and Juul Versteegen for nurturing two stressed-out guys 🙂