In the movie, before jumping into the text we should probably start with a sequence of John hanging out on Patmos, and then getting struck by a vision.

 cf.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_Patmos and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Revelation#Authorship

A nice thing about this is it allows us to us a couple different styles of animation at least.  Beginning with, for example, claymation while it's "real life" and then switching to some other kind of animation when the vision hits could be really neat--sort of like switching to color in The Wizard of Oz.