Pre-production 2

Johnny Wu
Director/Producer/Editor The Rapture

The Rapture - Pre-production 2

Little did we know that A Joker’s Card would go this far, winning awards, continuing showing at festivals and conventions, and finally ending with a sales agent taking to several film markets including Cannes, AFM, etc.

When we were done with A Joker’s Card, my cast/crew all asked if we were going to do a sequel, I thought of the idea, however, I didn’t feel comfortable to do another Batman type film or to make another parody film of any sort. I wanted to extend further what I would like the finished project to go to.

Backtrack: before shooting A Joker’s Card, I wanted to poke fun of the Batman Universe but I wanted also the film to be able to be shown not only at conventions but also at film festivals, and since the costume involved for Batman and such are way too expensive, I decided to create a world of their sons and daughters, cutting cost, and making it possible still as parody film to be shown at festivals as well. (Most festivals and now majority of conventions will not play fan films of WB/DC Comics nature).

Forward:
With The Rapture, I wanted something I own, and I wanted of my characters so we can eventually further develop them to other stuff we might want to do with them. So I re-edited a story I wrote years ago called The Rapture, that was more a Biblical story than anything else, readjust it to have an Anime/Sci-fi tone and re-wrote the script creating some new characters and Chimaeras.

So, I started to re-create the story, the world of Anime, the world of Chimaeras that were created by some scientist to ‘help’ the world… While writing the script, I realized it was short, it was only about 40 mins with the basic characters, and no matter how much I spin the story around them (4 characters in total), it just didn’t work. So I stopped.

Then there comes the audition process, which actually, helped my script as well, because of finding additional talented people, I managed to be able to add new characters that works within the story: the good, the bad, and the confused groups of people where each of them are constantly mistrusting each other and using each other for their own benefit…

Once I had the general concept of the idea converted from outline to script, I then forwarded the information to Mr. James V. Geier, who was previously the Executive Producer for A Joker’s Card. He was instrumental to the success of the script for The Rapture, because he brought in the viewers perspective, flushed the story out, make each character more believable, and above all, they have a distinct personality that slowly evolves through the story…

Once the script was finished, it was about 133 pages, reason, we added descriptions, for our own benefit, so we can relay to the story and we can forget about using storyboarding the feature (too much work and too little time to joggle that task). For the actors, we trimmed the script down to 95 pages, which is perfect for what we are aiming for with the finished project.

Now, with script is readied, cast is locked, we moves toward getting talented crew and securing funding… The process continues…