The Monkey: Location Scouting

For us, the location scouting process was fairly easy since the script was written with Corey's apartment building in mind.

The frontal view of Corey's apartment building.

The apartment complex was constructed in 1987, so its architecture perfectly fit our mise-en-scene. We knew we wanted to film the opening shot of the scene as an exterior to establish a disturbing tone, so we tried to stage it from the jump. We knew the general layout of Corey's room, so we decided on his side window for the opening shot. It provided a shot of our main characters that perfectly established the main components of the scene.

The angle we decided on for the film's opening shot.

Once we were done planning out our outside shots, we went inside to plan out the rest of the shots. Corey's apartment gave us all we needed: a kitchen, a hallway for long tracking shots, and a bedroom that could double as a safe space and a tight, claustrophobic area. While the layout, and most of the furniture and appliances fit our mise-en-scene, there were some modern fixtures, like some kitchen appliances, that we need to account for later on in the filming process.

A aerial sketch we made in Photoshop of Corey's apartment.