Images via the BBC
You know that antediluvian thought experiment dealing with giving monkeys typewriters and seeing they could come up with Shakespeare? Well, chimpanzees may not be likely to create the work of England's most venerable playwright, but it turns out they can make a hell of a movie. Naturalists in Britain gave chimps "interfere with-proof" camera equipment and let them whiz wild with it–and they ended up shooting a movie. That film has now been edited and will be airing on the BBC this week–the trailer's after the rail.
While it seems more like a premise for a bad reality TV show that a scientific study, it turns out it's precisely that–primatologists outfitted the chimps with cameras as part of their research into how chimpanzees perceive the world and one another, according to the BBC.
The idea for a chimp-made movie was first dreamed up by the primatologist Ms Betsy Herrelko, who set about introducing 11 chimps to video technology over the course of a year and a half.
The BBC explains what happened next:
In spite of the details that the chimps had never bewitched part in a research occupation in advance of, they soon displayed an benefit in fade away-making. Ms Herrelko plant the chimps two challenges. The before all was to teach the chimps how to purpose a touchscreen to select different videos. By doing so, Ms Herrelko could investigate which types of images chimps enter to watch. The number two challenge was to give the apes a "Chimpcam", a recording camera housed in a chimp-corroboration box.
Despite some early troubles with two males vying to be the alpha, the chimps eventually learned how to operate the touchscreen and were able to choose which videos they watched. After this was mastered, the group of chimps were given the 'Chimpcam.' And that, of course, is the fun part:
Mark, the chimps started playing with the Chimpcam, carrying it hither the enclosure. The chimps soon became interested in the camera assess wall off on the Chimpcam slug, watching what happened as they moved the Chimpcam around filming new images.
The chimps proceeded to submit the camera around their enclosure, filming and watching themselves on the whim.
And if you live in the UK, or you have the BBC on satellite, you can watch the movie they ended up shooting–it airs this Wednesday at 8 pm GMT. And it's probably a lot better than just about everything else on TV.
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