Where do stories come from? Sometimes they spring from our memories, sometimes from our unconscious, sometimes a passing remark. You just can never tell.
It becomes part of your life to expect a story to hit you when you least expect it. For creatives, the right nudge is all they need to leap in to the dark and drag an almost fully formed story out of seemingly no where.
The funny thing about the ‘jump off’ is they sometimes never make it to the final story, they were just needed to get the ball rolling.
Last year when we received the RFP to submit a story and script to take the annual LONDA digital rights report for Paradigm Initiative to the viewing public and not just the reading public, it was a challenge we were comfortable to take on.
We had done this 2 times for this client — in 2020 with ‘Training Day’ and in 2021 with ‘Focus’. We tentatively had a line of sight into the needed ingredients to win this pitch if we harnessed them properly.
Oje Ojeaga and i began as always by reading the LONDA report, in my case it was a speed read, noting some themes and issues of interest. For Oje, he got the summary read from our newly minted copywriter, Folakunmi Alabi.
Patterns are slow forming and hardly present themselves clearly as the wellspring to a new story but one must persist or miss them.
As our deadline drew close to submit a proposal, we started an informal chat on iMessage. Oje said he felt the story should begin with a bang. He was clearly trying to steer us in a new direction as both of our previous films were slow burners — the action escalated well into the story.
Oje was having none of that. ‘The Alfred Hitchcock way’’ he typed back, a clear reference to the master storytellers way of filling an audience with dread. A definite way to get the audience invested in the story straight out of the gate.
I suddenly remembered a picture of Childish Gambino (real name, Danny Glover) running in his landmark music video for ‘This is America’ that was so striking, I saved it on my phone many years ago. I dropped it in our chat to see if this could work for an opening shot — someone running.
In that way that has become second nature to our creative collaborations, Oje took off from seeing just that picture. ‘’She’s running’’. ‘’But why is she running?’’, he later asked.
She’s a journalist and has uncovered some shady dealing of her government, i replied…literally pulling that from God knows where. This was like music to Ojes ears as these 2 things — a ‘she’ and a journalist — were ripe gardens to hunt a story angle from.
The client had wanted us to have a female lead for ‘FOCUS’ but we persuaded them against it at the time. That story needed the lead to be someone that’s hated on and we counseled to do so would work better using a male lead.
The ‘journalist angle’ was rich because they represented an important group of stakeholders for digital rights we had not profiled in our past films. Reflecting on our notes, it was clear journalists had faced consistent threats in doing their jobs all over Africa in the year under review.
And that ladies and gentlemen was how we cracked the brief.
Oje would go on to flesh out the story beats with more input from the report, our understanding of the issues and our experience in creating characters an audience can care about. A full proposal was built, presented and we won the pitch.
If you have watched Finding Diana, you know the story didn’t start with the lead actor running, we came up with a more gripping intro that helped build our lead characters arc while delivering on the ‘gripping the audience from the start’ objective we started with.
Suffice to say, what finally made it to the screen had the priceless input of our very able Director, Tolulope Olamide Ajayi and two great screenwriters — Lani Aisida and Toluwani Obayan. The best creative work tends to always be a team sport.
I wrote this piece to encourage the writers, the planners and story development team members who likely struggle with where to begin in solving a brief. It helps to be a curious scavenger for creative stimuli. When a scene in a film intrigues you, make a note of it, a picture? Save it, a song? save it and create a playlist.
You never quite know where your next creative solution will come from, it helps to have a bank of creative stimuli somewhere close to your fingertips to tap from.
In the legendary words of Pablo Picasso, ‘Good artists borrow, great artists steal’’
Maybe just start with borrowing
