On first reading 'Monkey' seemed to be the perfect material to work with. I could make all the animal characters human, update it to a modern setting, shoot in interiors in th e developing Chinese communities in Ireland, and give it an electronic soundtrack from the D1 Recording artists.

To make it easier to produce I could break it down into sequences of a few minutes each and cut them to a particular electronic track. Thus that sequence would serve the dual purpose of being a crucial sequence within the overall narrative of the film but could also be viewed as the video for that individual track.

So, a longer narrative film would comprise a number of shorter music videos. Each sequence could be finished with a separate budget from each of the individual recording artists, which would be negligible in comparison to trying to raise a single budget for the entire project, and would avoid the pressure of a completion date, enabling me to complete each section with an individual schedule, thus giving me a similar artistic freedom to the one I had enjoyed with the Chaplin short.

This approach resulted in a reconnaisance trip to Hong Kong in 1999, to shoot videos for Irish labels 'Bassbin' and 'D1 Recordings'.

This trip radically changed the developing Monkey script.

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