Generating ideas
Looking at the theme of nature versus nurtureWhat shapes us as human beings? Our biology and ancestry or our upbringing and environment?, one could ask whether the life chances of the boys would be as different today. Have things changed, is life fairer? This theme could be your stimulus to create your own work.
Taking the idea of a narratorThe teller of a story. The voice that describes the events of the plot. A character within the story or separate to the story. speaking directly to the audience you could also create a piece of theatre in a documentary style. A television journalist persuades a mother living in poverty to hand over one of her twins to a wealthy couple, to see how differently the children develop. Their lives are secretly televised to examine if life chances are shaped by where we live and how much money our families have.
The secret filming concept was used in the film, The Truman Show and the idea of a nation spying on the individual is another rich theme for possible use as a stimulus. When exploring this idea, you could incorporate physical sequences and motifAn obvious key theme or concept that recurs in a work to create emphasis. Used in literature, art, theatre and dance. to link scenes, based upon our obsession with reality TV shows. You could also use techniques such as tableauA tableau is a single freeze frame, a still image. The plural of tableau is tableaux., flashbackA scene enacting something that happened in the past; the enactment of a character's memory of a past event. and choral speechA speech spoken by more than one person. Can be spoken in unison or with words and phrases repeated or echoed through the speech., as well as adding selected scenes from the original script to compare and contrast then with now.