The Monkey: Dealing with Coronavirus

Our plans to reshoot the movie at Corey's apartment on Saturday, March 14, 2020 were derailed due to the rising concerns of coronavirus in our county. The week leading up to March 14 seemed pretty normal. We were already planning what we were going to do differently on the second night of shooting. Ethan and I had arranged for our friend Joel to act in the movie to replace Ethan's role in the rough cut. Joel has had prior experience acting, and we thought he would bring some more weight to the film's opening. In addition to this, I had negotiated with our school's dram teacher to borrow some makeup to make a wound on Joel's throat in the final shot. I was also researching how to do this style of makeup.

Everything seemed like it was going to work out, but on Friday, March 13, in true Friday the 13th style, everything came crashing down. Our principal announced that schools would be closing and we would have to start taking virtual classes from home the following Monday. In addition to this, our county was deemed the epicenter of the pandemic in Florida, with over 20 cases diagnosed at the time.

An email to all students and parents of our school from Principal Gary Springer regarding school attendance during the pandemic.

An article via WPTV5 in West Palm Beach regarding Broward's leading number of cases.

The crew was still willing to shoot, albiet cautiously, but on filming day, Corey informed us that his mother wasn't comfortable with us coming over due to fear of spreading the virus. This meant that moving forward, we would have to work with what we had edited in school with the footage from the first night.
The following Monday, I went to school to retrieve what we had edited on the school computer. We were working in school with Final Cut Pro, a fairly high end editing software. Since we only had access to iMovie at home, we had to export what we had edited as a .mp4 file and not a project so we could transfer the workload in between softwares. Below is the unfinished rough cut, as of Monday, March 16th, 2020.