Well, I’m back in Lagos after a 15 day shoot at Pandrillus Drill Ranch up at Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary in Cross River state, Nigeria, and I’m proud to say I think I’ve got the rushes to potentially make a pretty good film! After changing my story a bit from being more about the importance of engaging local communities in conservation (it turns out that’s quite a difficult subject to really do justice in 10 minutes) to being more about the attempted release of 200 endangered drill monkeys back into the wild, we managed to get some great footage that I hope shows what an incredible experience it was being at Drill Ranch for such an important event. We also had the pleasure of sharing our location with the guys from Red Rock Films – watch out for what I’m sure will be an awesome film on Animal Planet around September/October time – so even if my film doesn’t turn out that well we’ve made some great contacts and friends in the industry and had a great time. If you haven’t been doing so already, follow my Twitter feed for tweets and photos showing what an amazing time we had (on the right hand side) or equally on Instagram at tomrichardswildlife. Thanks very much Jason Mulvaney and Aditi Rajagopal for helping me film – I’m very grateful!
I’ll be posting more as I start to edit the film and go through all the stills I have, but in the mean time here’s a photo of a handsome young drill…
Tom Richards 