About your Film Career to date

I've been a freelance filmmaker, model and content creator now for about 4 months now. I've worked for clients such as BBC Sierra Leone, Africas Young Voices (AYV) and Orange in Sierra Leone, but I'm currently looking for production work whilst building my portfolio of short films and social media content in Europe. It's been an exciting and busy time for me. I went from knowing absolutely nothing about using a camera, sound engineering and colour grading to competing and working with talented crews. So its been a privilege to have these opportunities to learn from veterans.

What challenges have you faced? How have you overcome them?

There have been 2 major challenges since i began on this journey. The first was location restraints. Living in West Africa where you have frequent brown outs, poor internet connection and a recovery film and tv industry that was devastated 30 years ago. Not to mention the upfront cost of buying and shipping gear in Africa. We have no rental facilities here and you would faint if you saw some of my invoices. It tends to put European film graduates circumstances into perspective. But as the saying goes account for factors you can't control and work with what you have. It just goes to show however bad you think you might have it, others have it worse and they still persevere so you really have no excuse. However, i think the major challenge i had was just being seen. It's easy to convince yourself that there's some sort of gatekeeping involve and i would be lying if i said their wasn't some truth to that. However, the reality is you haven't proven yourself yet and you haven't spoken to enough people yet. So my advice is just create. Produce content once per week you're first year for the portfolio and get over your shyness and interact with people. People are going to reject your ideas and your concepts and your going to blunder beyond belief. That's a reality so learn to disconnect from that and get over it quickly. The faster you do it, the faster you get to successes.

What are your career ambitions? What is your plan to get there?

My goal is to raise finance to build my own production company in West Africa. The only way i can do that is to save up or win competitions since there are no finance mechanisms in my region of the world in general. We'll start by training secondary school kids, do commercial work and function as a rental house for TV and radio stations. Getting students ready for larger productions and media companies isn't as hard as i thought it would be in such a small market especially in narrative storytelling and documentaries. It would take about a year to do and finding a good set of investors would likely take a lot longer but what I've learnt during my time there is that early adopters often hold a monopoly on the market so I'm willing to push through to get to the finish line.

What tips and advice do you have for those also on a similar journey trying to establish their film careers?

If you have an idea create it and keep on creating. Just do it, don't sit on it for months waiting for a magical windfall that, lets be honest is never going to happen. Applying for jobs without practicing your craft just makes you an expert at waiting. Do something during that time. Are your early projects going to suck absolutely, do them anyway. Finished is better than perfect. You can always revisit a finished work but you can't always recall a past idea. Create something every week. research it, plan it, reverse engineer what already works, build a workflow. Learn to love the process more than the art. Always publish and document your journey. You can either spend 3 months waiting for offers or you can shoot 12 short films for your portfolio and get ahead of the competition. Create in bulk so you don't burn out and touch grass when the need arises. The best ideas come from conversations with people and if you don't understand people, especially those you might not get along with, how will you hope to please an audience.