From Cape Town to Lagos, Animation blossoms.

Revolution Media, conveners of the annual ground breaking Lagos Comics and Cartoons Carnival have announced their plans in collaboration with Image Animation Studios- A Cape-Town, South Africa based powerhouse for multimedia communications to present a 3 Day workshop in 3D communication from Friday 18th January till Sunday 20th January 2008. The workshop is being supported by the culture activist organisation- Committee for Relevant Art (CORA) and stage design and lighting maestros- Total Consult Ltd.
The training will be led by Oladeji Victor, a director of Image Studios, Cape Town, S.A. and founder of Animation for Africa- an initiative geared towards training hundreds of Africans in visual effects and animation by the end of 2010. Deji has worked on several projects and adverts with Character Matters Animation Studio, Ambient Animation Studios, Telegenic Production and some of his work can be found in Issues of Faith - a television Magazine program on SABC 1, a TV commercial for Bank PHB, TV Commercial for Kenyan Power Authority, SABC 1 Anthem, and Cosmopolitan - Fashion Video amongst others. The workshop course content will cover introduction to 3D modelling with the Maya interface, understanding of textures, bump maps and the Photoshop workflow, lights and rendering, principles of animation and project workflow.
Oladeji, a representative for Autodesk will be launching a campaign in Nigeria later in March 2008 to create awareness about the latest Autodesk products. His most recent work has been on the feature movie "LION OF JUDAH" which is still in post - production and is expected to be out in America this Summer. He has been privileged to work with the likes of Tom Roth (from Disney) and Eric Lessard (Dream works) among other South African Animators.
“Participants will be provided with lecture notes, Maya PLE 8.5, Training DVD’s, Software, and free Registration for internet resources”, he says, “We are planning to open up the 3D animation industry in Nigeria; so that it can compliment the home videos and service the visual effects industry worldwide while we produce our own (Nigerian) animated feature Films”, he explains further.
Towards this end, training and internship programmes are being planned through the year in a three phase plan that will culminate in a media institute that offers specialized courses in 2D, visual effects and 3D animation. Animation for Africa’s mandate of empowering African animators is already bearing fruits with their training programme at the media village in Kalkbay, Cape Town where they have just graduated a batch of students and will be taking on a fresh batch in February 2008. The programme is designed to involve three months of intensive training and three months of internship with established animation houses in South Africa at a highly subsidized rate, much cheaper than what obtains in Canada, the United States of America or India for that matter where they have partners. Already, four Nigerians have benefited from this arrangement and Oladeji hopes to increase that number by ten fold in the present year.
Sewedo Nupowaku of Revolution Media is particularly excited about this collaborative effort at the very start of the year and is convinced that it portends an exciting year for the entire industry. His media and entertainment company had made efforts to stand in the gap as regards capacity building for the animation industry in November 2007 by holding an introductory workshop on animation at their 3rd annual Lagos Comics and Cartoons Carnival which exposed the wide enthusiasm people had for animation. “Now through this collaboration with Image Animation Studios, we can take that initiative to a whole new level and quicken our dreams for mass empowerment”.
The three day workshop will run from the 18th till the 20th of January 2008 at the CORA House, 1st Floor, 95 Bode Thomas Street, Surulere, Lagos and will cost N15,000.00 per participant. “Interested participants may mail revolutionmedia@yahoo.com, revolvingmedia@gmail.com or call 017416644, 017451990, 08067421215, 08033000499 for more information”, Nupowaku, who’s company is currently developing a dedicated television programme for comics, cartoons and animation called Action TV, reeled off with gusto, “This workshop will be the first in a series of collaborative capacity building projects between Revolution Media and Image Animation Studios”, he offered, grinning from ear to ear with infectious enthusiasm.

-Ayodele Arigbabu.
http://www.designpages.blogspot.com/
dreamarts.designagency@gmail.com

More photos from LC3 '07

Shhh...judges at work (Members of the Cartoonists Association of Nigeria)

Sola Alamutu, CEO of CATE presenting prize to overall winner of cartoon contest

Ouch! Pandora's Aisha is ...well, a knockout!

IC Studios' Ibrahim Ganniy has all ears at the animation workshop

Photos from the 3rd Lagos Comics & Cartoons Carnival, Nov. 2007

Revolution Media Stand @ the carnival

winning participants in the contest with workshop facilitators, judges and organisers

winners of the cartoon contest being announced by Mr Dada Adekola of Vanguard newspapers

Members of the Cartoonsts Association of Nigeria supervising workshop participants

Revolution Media's Sewedo nupowaku addressing the audience at the animation workshop

Will there ever be a Nigerian Incredible Hulk...

Will there ever be a Nigerian Incredible Hulk, a Batman from Abuja or Judge Dredd on the streets of Lagos? A new generation of Nigerian graphic artists say no: their comic heroes will be homegrown, writes Waldimar Pelser from Lagos.

The reincarnation of Nigerian dictators and democratic activists, Lara Croft-like super-heroes, and the kings and warriors of Nigerian legends has begun – between the covers of comic books. From Secrets of Allen Avenue, where male prostitutes lurk near the shadowy Orchid of Sin, to June 12, a graphic novel about the annulment of Moshood Abiola's election victory in 1993, a new breed of comics is giving young Nigerian readers a fresh take on what their country is about and what it could become. Their creators, driven partly by the success of Hollywood blockbusters with roots in the comics world(Batman, Superman, Sin City, Stardust), want to immortalise Nigeria's own heroes in graphic novels that may one day too hit the silver screen. A dearth of funding is hampering the realisation of this dream. Their work was at display this month at the thirdLagos Comics & Cartoons Carnival, where school children were taught the basics of the art, and some of the industry's young masters showed their work.

"We want to start something here," says Sewedo Nupowaku (30), a six foot plus Lagosian who studied law until creative urges drove him into the arms of animation art and comic strips. "Lots of kids are hooked on MTV and don't know anything about their culture. We as Nigerians, our fathers were kings, our mothers warriors. Everybodytalks about Churchill and (Napoleon) Bonaparte. Where are our own heroes?" Hoping to inject TV-watching youth with a sense of history, Nupowako conceived a comics series which includes The Legend of Moremi, the tale of early settlers from Saudi Arabia in the Nigerian town of Ile Ife, said to be the oldest town of the Yoruba people. This is a fabled world where forest demons live and boys listen as their mothers recount stories of bravery and conquest.

In the same volume Nupowaku tackles contemporary Lagos in Secrets of Allen Avenue. Based on an actual street in Ikeja, the Lagos state capital and part of today's metropolis, Allen Avenue is home to Linus the gun runner, The Orchid of Sin (where bar girls leave customers "fully satisfied"), and a cast of sleazy characters. "It used to be called 'cocaine avenue'," Nupowako says, referring to the Ikeja street, and his fictional rendition. "The good, the bad, the ugly, people with financial clout, banks; we want to chronicle howdifferent facets of Nigerian life interweave." What emerged is a world he calls "Tarantinoesque", after Quentin Tarantino, director of Pulp Fiction (1994).

The comics at the Lagos carnival tackle anything from futuristic fantasy to questions of ethnicity and identity, and most are presented in a racy style pitched at young readers of between 10 and 25 years old. What would Nigeria look like in 2145 AD? Nupowako's ACE Comics takes a guess in Naija Hardkore, with its totalitarian but orderly world where Lagos's yellow Molue taxi buses are jet-powered and fly, but policemen still accept bribes. In several other series, characters are saved from desperate and often realistic situations by the intervention of superhuman powers, as if nothing elsecould save the day. Pandora includes two such stories. Aisha, an orphan, is a computer sales lady to herfriends but morphs after hours into a Nigerian Lara Croft – a fearless street-fighter with exposed abdomen, a spandex suit, mask and a gun. In S.I.E.G.E., also in Pandora's story box, police commissioner Chiduem Okoro's daughter is kidnapped in Nigeria's oil rich Port Harcourt, until a flying hero snatches her from the hands of an armed gang.They may resemble the Ninja Turtles, but are far from mere fiction: kidnappings in the Niger Delta around Port Harcourt grab headlines here every other day. Nigeria's most brutal civil war also gets a mention in Kenway Oforeh's Kinetic. It is the story of a troubled young man whose father had been a soldier in a "civil strife" in 1967 (thesecessionist war in Biafra that claimed a million lives). He saves passengers in a hijacked Lagos public bus from murderous robbers by invoking supernatural powers inherited from his father, the retired major. Ofore (29) never mentions Biafra, the name given tothe eastern part of Nigeria by Igbo secessionists, some of whom still campaign for independence today. Also, he refers to Nigeria as a "marriage of convenience", so-called because of the belief that the country actually contains numerous distinct nations,united merely for the sake of convenience by British colonial rulers.

But by building into his narrative a character with roots in the Igbo east, Ofore feels he is doing his bit for integration and tolerance. "The trouble with this country is that most people don't know much about each other. If I tell people my middle name is Afam, short for Afamefuna, most of them will not know it is Igbo. The best way to educate people is to excite them; once I can excite them, I can educate them," Ofore says. "We have too many Yorubas in this country. Too many Igbos and Hausas. We don't have enough Nigerians." Sales of Kinetic are still modest, and like Nupowako, Ofore craves proper funding to increase his printing run and quality. In this vast market where distribution channels are mostly informal and artists rely on street vendors and a handful of bookshops to sell their work, few comics sell more than 2,000 at a time. But if a story is strong enough, it will find a way of being told, even at huge cost. Arguably the most ambitious project in recent years has been a graphic novel by Abraham Oshoko (27) which documents events around the 1993 presidential election in Nigeria.

June 12, The Struggle for Power in Nigeria shows how a northern political élite, led by the former Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Ibrahim Dasuki, pressurised the military regime of genl. Ibrahim Babangida ("IBB" as he is known) into annulling the results. Despite promises he would hand over to civilian rule in August that year, IBB allowed the election results to be annulled after it became clear a Yoruba, the business magnate Moshood Abiola, had won. Five more years of military dictatorship followed. The story has been told, but never in graphic form. Oshoko, who did the research, story and drawing, calls it a "non-fiction work of art".

"People, even elderly people, read it now and can't believe that all this happened. It is a warning to African leaders: whatever you do will be recorded." Will audiences in Johannesburg or Cairo or New York one day watch full-length animated movies produced by the likes of Oshoko, Nupowako and Ofore? Or will the soap opera-style video movies produced in their thousands in Nollywood, the vast local filmindustry, continue to dominate? "Abroad, comics and animation is a legitimate medium of expression," says Nupowako. "Japanese and Europeans are very serious about their comics. In the third world people still sometimes see comics as a kiddy medium." Institutional support is also sometimes lacking.

Ofore, a former psychology student, had "never seen an invoice before" when he started his comics business, and had to teach himself business skills. And then there's the funding hurdle, which often means comics like Naija Hardkore, Pandora and Kinetic remain paper-bound. The medium has its advantages, Nupowako believes. "It makes for muscular mental athletics. Comics have a way of igniting the mind."

As published in SA's CITY PRESS by Waldimar PelserLagos bureau chief, Media24 (South Africa)c/o Media24 Nigeria11A Adeola Odeku StreetVictoria Island, LagosMobile 1: +234-805-477-6310 (MTN)Mobile 2: +234-703-406-3150 (glo)waldimar.pelser@media24.com waldimar@gmail.com