Translating 21 Grammes from screen to stage.

The first bit of research I did was actually about the film 21 grams and why the film was titled this? And what it meant?  I then found out that when a human dies they lose 21 grams in body weight; we then started gathering idea around this such as the 21 grams being the human soul and as you dies your soul leaves your body.  I also found out that an average chocolate bar weighs 21 grams so we played with the idea of there being a chocolate bar incorporated in every scene somehow, as we thought that having a chocolate bar in every scene would be a bit to difficult. Another idea was that maybe in the very last scene all the characters that are dead would be lying on the stage with a chocolate bar resting on their chest.  But as we produce more drama and more characters were developing we decided that maybe trying to incorporate these ideas wouldn’t work and didn’t really fit in with the rest of our piece.

The other main way in which we needed to do research was because we were using projection and we needed to get certain images and information.  So in that sense probably the main storyline that was researched was the vicar and his wife trying to have a baby and because we had decided to use projections we needed to find picture of pregnant women and babies.  We also use projections for the train crash so we gathered together pictures and newspaper articles.  Nearly all the research for the pictures was by way of the Internet.

Some of the research we did wasn’t from the Internet though it was just straight from the television, in one of our scenes, which we called the women instituted, was particularly produced from an idea off the television and the programme was ‘Little Britain’, there is one character in the programme that says the line “I’m a lady” quite regularly so we started to devised a scene in a style like that and it ended up to be one of our best scenes.