John 6 is one of the most undermined Bible verses in our Christian faith. It is t the main reason Christ became man and God offered His only Son for our salvation. We surely did our best to be faithful to our Catholic teaching with the Bible and Church fathers. In our movie we want to emphasize how Christ explained His words of salvation to everyone, and the multitudes that left Him truly understood what He was talking about. This scene took many hours to light properly coupled with many permits and protocols imposed from the owner in addition to almost 2 days of preparation.
An important element for the synagogue was this Jewish scroll. It took weeks to build a big scroll prop that quickly brought the audience back to a specific time period. This prop was designed and finalized by Angelo but build by Sean Quandt. The Thora letters were painted by our apostle Phillip, Danny Galieote. This real, beautiful, historic scroll we found during our research. This prop would have cost us thousands of dollars to buy but we were able to make it due to the donation of time and material from faithful people who know the importance of this movie. This "little" thing helped the movie set enormously to hold that gravity of a teaching that can change people lives forever. Christ Himself said, "Except you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you."
Thank you to our great gaffer Marty, who worked on “Star Trek”, “Pirates of the Caribbean”, “Jack and Jill”, and other movies. He brought incredible experience to perfectly light the scenes as the Director/DP envisioned it. A special thank you to Paul Vigil, our special effect specialists, who took care of all the torches, flames, and smoke effects. He has worked on “Ocean’s Eleven”, “Fast & Furious”, and more. What incredible shots the team got!
Thank you to Rob Renzi, Thomas Plunkett, Danny Galieote, Eugene Prokofiev, Oswaldo Sanchez who helped to bring the pillars and several other props from the rental house to the set and helped decorate it according to the verbal description and a drawing done on the cardboard of a pizza box from Angelo, as he was busy filming another scene. Many thanks to Evan Matthew who played the AD well in such a tight schedule.
A big thanks goes to Andrew Sanches who brought Menorahs, a little touch that brought us to that time period and helped to make the temple scene more authentic and believable.