The Witches production meeting 1

 The Witches production meeting 1:

08/09/2021

One of the productions we will be working on this year will be a theatre production of The Witches by Roald Dahl. It will be held at Stockton Riverside College on the 20th and 21st of October 2021. 

The Witches is a story of a young boy (Luke) and his grandmother staying at a hotel in England. Luke inadvertently discovers and spies on a convention of evil witches. He finds out that the Grand High Witch has a plan to turn all children into mice through a magical formula. When they find out that Luke had overheard their discussion, the witches test their formula on him. Now, with the help of his grandmother, Luke the mouse must fight back against the witches.

Overall, there are 3 adaptations of the original book that was published in 1983: 2 movies (the first one was released in 1990, the second one was more recent; released in 2020) as well as a theatre adaptation. The book was written by the British author Roald Dahl, and was originally published in 1983. The first film is 1hour 31minutes long and was released in 1990. The director of the film was Nicolas Roeg, screenplay was done by Allan Scott. They avoided changing the original story and tried to keep the storyline as close to how the book was written as possible. This film has won 3 awards and has been nominated for 8. The second film adaptation is 1hour 46minutes long and was released in 2020. This film was directed by Robert Zemeckis, screenplay was done by Robert Zemeckis, Kenya Barris and Guillermo Del. Overall, this film hasn’t won any awards but has been nominated for 10. 

For the first production meeting, we started off by discussing as a team what The Witches was about and then moved onto delegating tasks. I collaborated with Francesca and Paige to collect up images and produce an A2 moodboard of the book and theatre production of The Witches as well as doing a small amount of research on the story. Leah and Isobel were also gathering images to create an A3 moodboard on the film adaptation.

We felt as though this was a good place to start off so as to give us a general idea on the kind of things we will need to keep in mind for future meetings (such as the different character looks, the kind of lighting used in the theatre production, the transformation of some of the characters; such as the witches taking off their wigs, the boys changing into mice as well as the hideous look of the Grand High Witch). 

Whilst we were doing this, Kassie and Emily were reading through the script and taking a note on the different characters we will need to take into consideration.