The Monkeyshine Creatives....
Adrian Spanna
Jonathan Maris
Adrian completed a fine art degree specialising in painting and mixed media at Sheffield Hallam. Joining the Film Industry in 2000, he started working in Propmaking departments until he joined a company producing screen graphics. His work here meant he honed his motion graphic and editing abilities, but also gave him the opportunity to work on set. Working as part of the shooting crew, as a Video Op, was invaluable in learning the film making process and teaching him about framing a shot and building a scene.
Combining his technical computer skills and his drawing ability, the natural move into Storyboarding and Animatics seemed a logical progression.
His first collaboration with Jonathan was on Jason Bourne. Since then, with every project, they've fine tuned their internal workflows and external integration with the Film Editorial department, ever improving the value of their storyboard animatics within the Film Industry.
Jonathan studied art and music at Brighton Polytechnic. Then started working on sets as an art assistant and making props. In turn this led to an opening to be a storyboard artist and a long career in films, TV and commercials. Working closely with great directors over the years has given a great knowledge of the film making process, visualising scripts, shot composition and storytelling.
Along with storyboarding, in a parallel career, Jonathan has written and produced music for television. Specialising in sync-to-picture soundtracks for documentaries and commercials.
In 2016 the opportunity to create animatics for the Bourne movie with Adrian came up. Their pooled knowledge and skill sets fitted perfectly and they formed a fast and efficient team working on many projects since.
Monkeyshine was born (out of Bourne you could say :-) )
Our work...
Monkeyshine are renowned for producing bespoke animatics and boards for film and TV quickly and efficiently. Combining over 50 years experience we work closely with directors, producers, editorial, VFX or stunt teams and combine multiple disciplines to distil and clarify ideas into a visual representation of the action and emotion in a scripted sequence. Using storyboards, 3D set/background generation, animating, comping, editing, writing, soundtrack composition and editing and even guide VO to deliver our work.
Every project is different. With The Lost Bus we started with rough drawings and gradually added other elements. We animated action onto location footage. Spliced in shots from VFX. Added composites of location photographs and drawn images, location information, news reels and also a sound FX track and music. This went on to build a ‘production bible’ for the whole film that all departments referred to. On Rings of Power we worked with VCam shots and also built 3D sets to produce storyboards that were accurate and precise. On No Time to Die we animated on footage we shot using GoPro’s on location in Italy to visualise the Aston Martin car chase. We worked on location for Dolittle and animated 2D onto fresh rushes to get a running edit back to the director the same day, to show how the CGI would fit with the shots.
With all productions, we can be fluid in our approach and deliver what is needed to help the project come to fruition.