The Chimpcam Project

by John Capener

In early 2001 I was watching TV late one night. Well I say watching. Flicking idly through the channels hoping something of sublime genius would leap out at me. Previous experience had seemingly taught me nothing. I paused briefly on a show where a young bloke was addressing a camera perched askew on some kind of base. As he was telling us how unfair his life was the camera fell off. He fumbled on the floor for a while and reset the camera. The new framing meant we couldn’t see his mouth but saw a lot of the space above his head. Five incredulous minutes later I was still watching. It turned out that this wasn’t a carefully chosen moment of diary material – this was the show. This lad (who did seem to be leading a hard life), had been given a camera, little or no tutoring and sent on his way. This was the only source of filming, so I couldn’t work out whether his ineptness was meant to be poignant or if I should be laughing at him. I found the thought shape in my head “a chimp could have shot this.”

Once I’d had the initial dumb idea of building a camera a chimp could use I began the process of saying it out loud to other people to see how much they’d laugh. I started with colleagues in the wildlife film making business. As it turned out, laughter was not a common response. Reactions varied. Some felt it could be phenomenal! Groundbreaking! But that’s TV for you. Others felt it was interesting but far too high risk to bet a decent budget on. And some felt that modern TV turnaround could never allow us enough time to do it properly. These people would then extend their rambling to cover the current dumbing down of TV, the golden years of the BBC and other such topics. At this point it’s best to just back out of the room slowly.

However, encouraged by the lack of outright derision I took a deep breath and started to contact primatologists. To my amazement the response was once again positive. Admittedly they were filled with caveats and provisos. And I frequently had to look very closely for the positives in amongst the dire warnings of doom. This was especially true when it came to the combination of chimp strength and stubbornness. But they were not laughing me out of town and I have a very hopeful nature.

Once we got past my near certain failure and discussed the 5% chance that something would work I was offered examples of what might interest the chimps. Areas out of vision was a favourite- especially where the food is prepared or where the keepers emerged from. An intriguing idea was that the chimps may use the camera to explore their own bodies – inside their mouth, the back of their head, etc. It wasn’t all positive though. It seemed my more cynical colleagues in TV were right and time (specifically the lack of it) would be our biggest obstacle.

The time felt right to put a page of words and pictures together and put it in front of TV commissioners. This was the longest and most perplexing part of the project. Commissioning is a strange beast at the best of times. But Chimpcam being Chimpcam, it had to be different again. At first everyone was excited about it, but always enthusiastically suggested we take it somewhere else! During spring 2007 the BBC Natural World strand saw it for the second time. Not only did they remember it but declared the timing perfect and commissioned it almost straight away. All we needed was somewhere to film it. Ah!

It had been a few years now since I was last in touch with my primatology contacts and something curious had happened in the interim. Perhaps during those years chimps had become even more strong and stubborn. But faced with the shift from hypothetical to real all the tiny rays of potential that had forced holes through the prophecies of doom were now stifled completely. Not only was there hesitance to be involved in the project as individuals, no-one could recommend a colony to work with. After a few months we hit such a brick wall that we reluctantly decided to withdraw the film from the BBC.

Hard as a film is to get commissioned, it turns out that de-commissioning a film is close to impossible. The BBC were disinterested in the minor concern of not having any chimps and sent us back out to get on with it. We would have to deliver it by the end of 2009.

Starting from square one I went up the road to Bristol Zoo and chatted to their senior primatologist Dr. Bryan Carroll. Bryan had all of the words of warning that my previous correspondents raised, but he also was intrigued. In fact we even discussed the possibility of taking it to a semi-wild colony in Africa. It was a level of positivity I was not used to. As we were wrapping up Bryan thought for a while and then recommended I contact a colleague of his, Professor Hannah Buchanan-Smith at the University of Stirling. He said he could think of no-one better to help make this project happen. And he was right.

There followed a course of friendly but rigorous emails between Hannah and myself. My aims and motivations were thoroughly cross-examined; as was my understanding of what could feasibly happen and how this would all be portrayed. I think my sincerity in the importance of a scientific core to the film was underlined by my offer of funding research as part of the film. A presenter’s fee well spent, I felt. This and my enthusiasm for tricking people into watching a film on chimp cognition finally won her over. Two important things then happened. Hannah wanted to involve Dr. Sarah-Jane Vick, also at Stirling, because of her experience working with chimps. And crucially, Hannah suggested I contact Iain Valentine at Edinburgh Zoo as they were about to open a brand new chimp facility. Scientific endorsement and a chimp colony – all in one email. The 26th of September 2007 was a good day.

Iain replied within minutes of my initial response, saying I’d won the unusual request of the day category in his email box. From that point it moved very rapidly. In November 2007 we held a meeting at the zoo where Burning Gold, Stirling and the Zoo talked through the possibilities. It was agreed we should advertise for a PhD candidate and follow their story. The new Chimp facility, Budongo Trail, would open in March 2008. We should aim to have our student in place as close to that as possible. Seemed to make sense. So that’s what we did…….