Monkey Business

Monkey Business was a project made for The Hartlepool Wintertide Festival 2020. The brief was brought to us by the university however our involvement within the project was purely external. This was my time working on a project with people, previous to coming to university my only real 'filmmaking' experience was on collage projects where I was sort of a one man band (Of course excluding highly skilled Oscar worthy friends who I tricked into being on camera). This project would ultimately look to improve my ability to communicate my ideas and instructions within a collaborative setting. I worked as a director mainly, working with everyone on, deciding on the next pose and how the character would get into its next state, as well as this I edited the piece to match it with the sound and the songs throughout as well as in order to add credits.

The Hardest part about working as a group for the first time was agreeing on an idea, as new students we were all quite anxious to work around one another, we all had a few ideas

Watch Monkey Business:

but those ideas never fit, I think being around new people we wanted to really show what we could bring to the table and in doing so we attempted to come up with either deep or thought provoking storylines that never really fit the brief, or what we wanted to make as a whole anyway. After a few sit down sessions we eventually landed on something light hearted, something the kids who would watch the festival could connect with and understand while also teaching an important (if not blatantly obvious) lesson.

Editing this project was pretty unique, rather than putting the clips together they were already there, my job was to clean up any mistakes we had made frame to frame, whether we had knocked the camera slightly or the lighting changed drastically, it was a difficult and sometimes seemingly impossibly endless task, having to constantly check over the smallest details, however I became a lot sharper during this project, picking up on small details as well as the ever important skill of recognising why something doesn't look right rather than just knowing it doesn't 'for some reason'.