HIC- Research- Tomorrow when the war began

I recently read a book series called "Tomorrow when the war began", it is about a group of teenager in Australia who go camping but while they are away their country is invaded and all their friends and family are taken prisoner and used as slave labour while the new settlers eventually move in. The story follows the teens as they attempt to fight back and survive the war cased by this invasion.

I really like using the idea of war in our piece but I especially like the way this series looks at how war can affect civilians trapped in it and how the characters change throughout the war. I feel that if we do a piece where we each have a distinct regular teenage character before a war and we have a short monologue each explaining who we are. This will bring great levels of characterization to our performance and we would each have to do some research in the possible effects of war. We then do a movement piece to show the start of war and we freeze to to do some more speech on how we have changed already. Then we do some more movement to show maybe a death of one of our friends and more monologues about how we feel the end with the end of the war and speech of how we have changed. We could do each speech in a for of a short diary entry to quickly get the idea of whats happened since the last speech.

The first book was turned into a movie and the opening and ending have a kind of diary entry where Ellie talks directly to the audience. I'm thinking of our speeches to work similarly to that kind of like and interview. Here is the opening and ending of the movie

Opening
I'm not gonna hold back.
I warned the others that I wouldn't.
Recording it like this
is so important to us.
I guess it's our way of telling
ourselves that we matter.
That we mean something.
Maybe...
some of the things we've done...
and the friends that we've lost...
hopefully it all makes
a difference somehow.
There's only one way to do this.
And that's to go back
to where it all began.


Ending