‘Chunky Monkey’ Strikes It Right With Anvil

The Foundry has announced its involvement with ‘Chunky Monkey’, a feature length project from Open Road Films.
Written and directed by Greg Cruttwell, the story follows an evening in the life of one Donald Leek, (played by David Threlfall) as he mourns having chopped up his local Indian restaurant manager for not sending him a Christmas card. His bizarre ruminations are severely interrupted by an entourage of peculiar visitors, each as unhinged as their host, who retaliates to the intrusion in an extreme fashion.
Running at 90 minutes, shot in HD in just 14 days and edited on Avid|DS at Open Road, both Cruttwell and Phil Hunt (producer) wanted to push the post further and create a more “filmic” look.
Cruttwell explained: “As we had shot in HD the resolution was very sharp and looked rather like the old BBC ‘Play For Today’ series. We wanted to create some ‘space’ between the story and the audience, in short, produce a filmic look via VFX“.
Due to the budget, it was not possible to transfer the project to film and take the usual Telecine route, so it was transferred to Digi Beta and using The Foundry’s Anvil Bleach Bypass spark, Tim Sparks (MD, Image Creative) created a stylised look once the filmic effects had been added in DS.
Sparks commented: “The DS has a great suite of tools and went a long way to achieving the feel that we wanted, however it was the Bleach Bypass which created the final unique look and melded all the FX together, so doing exactly what plug-ins are designed to do. I have heard great things about Anvil in the past and it was a pleasure to see it for myself.”
‘Chunky Monkey’ is planned for theatrical release in 2004 via UK distributors Screenprojex in association with Headgearfilms.
(GB)