Kaitangata Twitch

Yvonne Mackay (director and executive producer) directed all 13 episodes of Kaitangata Twitch and brought the series to life after purchasing the rights.  She has previously collaborated with writer Margaret Mahy on the children’s series Cuckoo Land, (Gold medal winner at the 1986 New York Film Festival); the three part mini-series Typhon’s People and The Haunting of Barney Palmer, a telefeature starring Ned Beatty. She also recently directed the innovative 70 minute documentary A Tall, Long-Faced Tale in which Mahy is interviewed by her own characters and colleague Elizabeth Knox.  Mackay became New Zealand’s first female feature director in 1983 with Joy Cowley’s The Silent One and has developed and directed hundreds of hours of some of New Zealand’s most popular television series including Duggan; The Insiders Guide to Happiness and its follow-up The Insiders Guide to Love.

Margaret Mahy (wrote the book Kaitangata Twitch) and in 2006 received the world’s most prestigious prize for children’s literature - The Hans Christian Andersen award, given for a whole body of work.  She has also been awarded the Order of New Zealand and the Esther Glen Medal of the New Zealand Library Association six times.  Her novels ‘The Haunting’ and ‘The Changeover’ both won the Carnegie Medal of the British Library Association.  Other awards include the Young Observer Fiction Prize; the Italian Premier Grafico Award and the Dutch Silver Pencil Award, to name but a few.  Mahy continued to bring magic to Kaitangata Twitch, in a cameo as herself in a scene at the library.

Dorothee Pinfold has been a longtime player in the NZ screen production industry domestically and internationally, with over 20 years as in marketing and sales and Executive Producing family and primetime drama. She has worked with Mackay on the television series Duggan; Mirror Mirror and the television adaptation of Margaret Mahy’s Typhon’s People.  She also Executive Produced the award-winning Bread and Roses with Gaylene Preston and Robin Laing and the miniseries The Rainbow Warrior Conspiracy. 

Jan Haynes is currently working with Weta Productions producing their children series The Wotwots, and Jane & The Dragon which she line-produced.  She worked with Mackay producing episodes of the TV series The Insiders Guide to Happiness and Duggan, which she co-produced along with episodes of The Strip.  Haynes also line-produced the features The Last Tattoo, with Tony Goldwyn, Rod Steiger and Robert Loggia and Scott Reynold’s Heaven.

Strawhan and Bennett recently co-wrote the feature Matariki which Bennett directed.  Additional directing credits include the local hit comedy series Outrageous Fortune and Mataku, a Maori 'Twilight Zone’.  He has also written the feature Jubilee, starring Cliff Curtis and the short film Cow which featured at many international festivals. 

Strawhan devised and served as Head Writer on recent local comedy drama series Go Girls; Burying Brian and This Is Not My Life an action-mystery starring Charles Mesure.  He has developed numerous local TV and feature productions including Jubilee, Whale Rider and What Becomes of the Broken Hearted. 

Grace-Smith’s first plays Nga Pou Wahine and Purapurawhetu won top theatrical awards while her others have toured extensively at home and abroad.  For TV she wrote the drama Fishskin Suit and her first feature, The Strength Of Water, premiered at the Rotterdam and Berlin film festivals in February 2009.  She also co-wrote the short film Lilly and Ra, for the United Nations in 2008 and received the inaugural Arts Foundation Laureate award in 2000.

David Paul (director of photography) first worked with Yvonne Mackay shooting The Insiders Guide to Happiness and its follow up, The Insiders Guide to Love, both of which were nominated for Best Camera.  He also filmed Mackay’s innovative documentaryA Tall, Long-Faced Tale and Gaylene Preston’s UK doco Time of Our Lives, among several others.  He was director of photography on the telefeature Until Proven Innocent and 2nd unit DOP on Show of Hands, starring Melanie Lynskey.  Of Kaitangata Twitch he says “It’s a huge privilege to film this New Zealand icon’s work”.

Gary Mackay (production designer) worked on Margaret Mahy’s Typhon’s People, directed by Yvonne Mackay, when he was starting out in the art department.  However his work on the Mahy series Madigan’s Quest ensured his role on Kaitangata Twitch.  Gary Mackay also headed the armoury department on Lord of the Rings and won Best Design for the feature Savage Honeymoon.  Additional film credits include The Ugly, The Locals and the horror, The Ferryman.  More recently Mackay worked as Production Designer on The Tattooist, a NZ/Singaporean co-production; the BBC telefeature The Man Who Lost His Head, starring Martin Clunes and the local comedy drama Go Girls.  Of filming Kaitangata Twitch in Governors Bay outside Christchurch he says: “The area is so beautiful; even the historic little cottages with beautiful established gardens; community halls; libraries and so on ended up making the series much prettier even than we originally envisaged.”

Paul Sutorius (Editor)  Paul Sutorius has worked with director Yvonne Mackay on numerous projects including the drama series Duggan; The Insiders Guide to Happiness and its follow-up The Insiders Guide to Love as well as the partly-animated documentary A Tall, Long-Faced Tale and Aspiring, for which he won Best Editor. He has edited many children’s programmes, such as The Tribe, Swiss Family Robinson and two Enid Blyton series.  Sutorius has also collaborated with director Gaylene Preston on many productions including her recent feature Home By Christmas as well as War Stories (Our Mothers Never Told Us); Ruby and Rata and Bread and Roses.  Additional features include Absent Without Leave; Chunuk Bair; For Good and The Irrefutable Truth About Demons, starring Karl Urban.   He says of Kaitangata Twitch:  “It’s bloody good fun, but it’s more than that.  It’s not just a family series.  It’s got a number of layers, all of which make it a really interesting project.” 

Gareth Farr (composer) is one of New Zealand’s most prolific and charismatic composers.  He collaborated with Richard Nunns, a living expert on traditional Maori instruments, to create the hauntingly beautiful music for Kaitangata Twitch and the sound effects depicting the sighs and grumbles of an island possessed.  He previously worked with Yvonne Mackay on the telefeature Clare and the drama series Duggan.  More recently he collaborated with Witi Ihimaera (author of Whale Rider) on The Wedding for the Royal New Zealand Ballet.  At the age of 25, Farr became the youngest ever composer-in-residence at Chamber Music NZ and in 2007 became Composer-In-Residence at the Auckland Philharmonic Orchestra culminating in Ex Stasis and later Terra Incognita for the NZSO to name but a few of his compositions.   He received a theatre award for his soundtrack to Vula, which also performed overseas including Australia, the UK and Netherlands.  Farr was awarded a NZ Order of Merit in 2006 for his Services to Music and Entertainment.

Ian Taylor (animation, digital enhancement and editing) is “a great fan of Margaret Mahy’s so to have the opportunity to work on something of hers is fantastic,” he says.  “It’s quite a large special effects job, as is probably typical of everything Margaret Mahy writes.”  Taylor created special effects for Mahy’s earlier children’s series Cuckoo Land directed by Yvonne Mackay but he is probably best known for revolutionizing televised sport coverage with the development of a 3D real-time graphics tracking application for the Americas Cup and the world's first live, real time 3D internet coverage of the same event. He has also produced numerous commercials and award-winning digital presentations.  Creating an island “that has a fist just that punches up to the sky; that crunches and grinds and shakes with stress” was in the hands of Ken Gorrie at Taylor’s Animation Research Ltd.

Anthony Lealand (mechanical and pyrotechnic special effects) used the skills of his company crew at Firework Professionals to create the exploding car demolishing the sign. Then to his design, they built the yacht pilings and rolled the yacht in the earthquake scene. It was an unusual return to working with Margaret Mahy's writing for Lealand. Years before she had delivered a poem she wrote for the opening of the first Christchurch Arts Festival. Here Margaret was 10m in the air on a cherry picker happily reading her poem while surrounded by fireworks choreographed by Lealand to her poem. While Lealand is best known for fireworks choreographed to open-air performances by live orchestras, the ASO, CSO and NZSO; he also competes internationally inpyrotechnic musical choreographic competitions in France Germany and China. The recent viral Hell Pizza Youtube video used SPFX designed and operated by Lealand.