As It Was Revealed Unto Jeroen Eisinga1998

A picturesque view of a country road gives way to an idyllic tableau of a whitewashed farmhouse, in front of which sits a buxom woman dressed in Dutch folk costume holding a chubby bare baby, whom she cheerfully chuckles. Russian sacred music. Mother and child gaze serenely smiling, straight at the camera. They ascend on high.

"The original footage of As it was Revealed Unto Jeroen Eisinga was 16mm negative film. For the filming, I hired an Aerial Platform to lift the woman and her child (my actors) up in front of their background. But because we were standing on muddy soil, the platform was very wobbly and the safety mechanism became activated, and the machine refused to go up. To get around this, we disconnected the safety button. The ride up was very bumpy and hazardous. The platform was shaking from left to right, and the machine was hard to control. It went like 'BANG BANG BANG STOP OK A BIT MORE UP,' and so on. We were up there filming with a naked baby and her mom, sitting at half a meter near the edge of the platform with the guard rail removed so that it wouldn't block the view. There were also two giant heaters blowing heat at the actors to prevent the baby from catching a cold (it was in November and near freezing), and there were three other crew members on the platform as well. I was honestly afraid the whole thing would capsize, and we were at 15 meters above the ground! The original footage we shot was shocking and didn't give the smooth image I had hoped for. So later I decided to slow the image down to make it all look smoother. In order to do that, I needed to make an inter-positive print and after that a new negative, but because of the amount of detail in the film (especially the checkered pattern in the woman's dress) I decided to have an inter-positive made on 35mm and a new negative on 35mm as well. I wanted to have as little loss of quality as possible. I tried a 16mm print from the 35mm negative, but the quality and the colors looked horrible. So I made a 35mm print for projection. I projected it only once in The Netherlands and the quality looked amazing. With some films the quality doesn't matter that much, but with this one I really wanted the audience to get into a religious state of mind or mood, and the beautiful quality and the size of the projection helps to achieve this feeling." -J.E.