The story teaches an important lesson about honesty and peer pressure for children.
It's a very good story for kids and has been one of my favorite story tapes since I was a child.
This is one of the reasons why I decided to do this play.
It all started one day when my sister Gloriana and I remembered about this story that we had not thought
of for many years. We decided to get it out and play it for her little girl, Sadye. It brought back such wonderful
memories of when I was little, and loved to act it out with Gloriana and one of my other sisters named Carmel.
Sadye was five and loved the tape so much that she played the tape constantly. We begin acting it out all over again.
Sadye and I both liked playing Nathaniel so we would take turns playing him. The one who wasn't playing Nathaniel
would get to play a bunch of other great parts that both of us also enjoyed playing when it was our turn.
Gloriana always enjoyed being tails and the Direwood tree.
One day I finally decided to turn our fun into a real event. At that time some friends and I had a little club
called "The Cool Kids Club." We planned way in advance to perform the play in August to celebrate our clubs anniversary.
I had put on small skit plays before and videotaped them, but I had never done a long one with a real cast.
I wasted no time. I went to the phone, called my friend Emily and asked her if she wanted to try out my idea.
She agreed to give it a shot. We held all our club events in Emily's HUGE backyard. It's big enough to hold more than 25 people.
One side of the yard is one level higher then the other side. It also has stones built around the sides of it making it look like
an actual out door stage. The other side, which is lower than the other, is where we had the audience sit. There is
another part of the garden that we didn't usually include for use of our events except, for one time when we did use it
to put our refreshments out. Most of the time we didn't use that area. This time however, that too was about to change
because that part of the garden has a play structure with a small playhouse that at the time was perfect for the Grublet's house!
Although this was a great idea, there was a lot of work to be done before we could put this play on.
I needed to plan, organize, call people to see if they wanted to participate, type up a script, make copies of the script,
help kids practice their parts, make costumes, buy my costume, etc. I had a lot of work to do before the month of August arrived,
but I was so excited that all the preparation was fun.
The best part though was finding people to play the characters. It was so much fun! I would think of the best person
who could play the right part, and then give them a call to ask them if they were interested. I found so many people
who wanted to be in this play it was incredible!
My sister Gloriana got to play two of her favorite characters in the story. She loves to be Tails because he's the head grublet
who gives all the orders just like she does. She also got to play the lead Direwood tree who sings a scary song
when Nathaniel and Smuggles(his dog) find themselves in Direwood.
Sadye, her little daughter, got to be a little pink bunny who is Glori's other favorite character.
Antoinette, one of my other nieces, played Nathaniel's dog Smuggles, who is with Nathaniel through the whole story.
Her little face was panted like a puppy's. She also had a brown doggy tail. I sewed her costume for her.
I asked Yvan Strong, (one of my mom's friends) to do the filming of our play because she was so good at filming,
and the filming went very well. There were alot of adults as well as children involved.
Although I tried to match all the people to the right characters, not everyone was a good actor or actress,
and some didn't know all their lines. They did their best though, and It was wonderful how well the movie came out.
Even though there were some parts in the production that I wished had been done differently, I still enjoyed watching it,
and I was encouraged to do more plays in the future.
My mom told me that it didn't matter if the play didn't look professional. She said what was important
was the skills we were all developing and the fun we were all having. I realized she was right.
We had so much fun watching the movie afterwards and laughing at all the funny parts we did!
I won't ever forget that summer. Over the last year I have edited the movie, adding effects and replacing the sound track with the original.
Making this movie has led me to continue to learn more about working with multimedia. I hope to continue studying this.