Blessing Amidu is a veteran in the oil and gas industry with over two decades of experience. She, however, has a flair for content creation and the creative sector.
Amidu’s love for taking her time to watch films has seen her produce one of Nigeria’s widely acclaimed titles, ‘Lady Buckit and the Motley Mopsters.’
The success of the 2020 Nigerian computer-animated fantasy film has seen Amidu returning to create a spin-off entitled ‘Secrets Of The Multiverse’ (SOTM).
On the new project, she said, “Okay, the ‘Secrets Of The Multiverse’ (SOTM) is a spin-off of ‘Lady Buckit and the Motley Mopsters’ (LBMM), which is the original title from 2020. This particular story is about leadership and all the sides to it, depending on how one wants to look at it in different situations. It can be mostly fear, a threat to life, maybe scarcity and aggravation. It looks at how far a leader is willing to go to protect his people and the choices that may stare him in the face.
“The series also explores the reasons behind the actions of leaders of society, basically the length a leader would go – and in this case, it is a futuristic world – to protect his people. It also weighs on the morality of these people. Their actions, their choices, and the benefits of their citizens. And then it also bears critical thinking to determine the value of life and the extent of morality necessary to justify a wrong. Is it good to commit a crime as long as you know it benefits your people? Is that said crime justifiable? Is it unpunishable? So that is pretty much a summary of what ‘Secrets of a Multiverse’ is all about,” she said.
Amidu also went further to explain why she’s found a niche in animation saying, “Animation was just a genre I fell in love with, especially because I spent a lot of time with my kids watching cartoons during their growing-up years. And I was enticed or influenced by the characters on TV. And I could see that we didn’t have African stories to showcase in Nigeria. So that was how animation came to be. I started thinking, brooding over it. And then, just like a light bulb, we realised that there’s no feature-length film in Nigeria, so we started from there with LBMM.” Continuing, she said, “My first daughter, who’s a film studies graduate, just began to sketch those characters. She’s quite artistic. By the time we slept in through the night and woke up the next morning, we had names for the first five characters. So that is how you know this whole thing started. I love animation so much. Who knows? Like I often say, I may branch off into the regular live-action someday. So I’m not just limiting myself, but right now, this is where we have started, and this is where we are.”
On why she decided to produce her daughter’s story, Amidu said, “First of all, after the premiere of LBMM, we knew we were going to have a sequel to that movie; we hadn’t just found the right story. And I began looking for writers, talking to writers to get us a story. And the feelers I was getting, apart from the fact that it was quite expensive, I wasn’t getting what I thought would be a good story. One of the things that set me off was when somebody told me that writing an episode of an animated series would be about $3,000 per episode. This was about three years ago. I was shocked. I began to look inwards. I could write it, but I’ve been quite busy. I know my daughter writes stories, short stories. I stumbled on my daughter’s talents. I had asked her to write a few short stories, and as God would have it, one of the short stories she wrote added so much potential for expansion that I just asked her to write six episodes. The first episode she wrote was something else. It blew me out of my mind.
“I sent that episode to Adebisi Adetayo, who was the director for LBMM in 2020 and who’s also the current director for SOTM. Adebisi was surprised, and he asked me if this was AI, and I was like ‘What do you mean?’ He was really surprised, and then he asked my daughter to write another episode, which she did. To tell you how unserious I was about it, I made her use a free version of the writing software. Just write, and let’s see how it goes. She wrote the first episode, the second episode, and it was just… I couldn’t comprehend. Adebisi himself was so surprised. We figured that this story could work. The more she wrote, the more blown away we were, and our confidence grew. After that, the rest is history. Like I mentioned earlier, she already had some short stories which are yet unpublished.
“We’re going to publish them quite shortly. I’m just so grateful to God. I asked her to increase the number of episodes to 13, and she did, effortlessly, too, I might add. Being creative just flows so easily out of her. I’m grateful to God that I have a daughter. I have a daughter like her. So, whose story would I publish or produce other than my daughter’s? It has so much potential to do well in a market, and you will be so surprised at the depth of the story. For someone of her age, you’ll be so surprised at the depth of the story. All the people I gave the story to read came back with the same feedback. I was sure, definitely sure, that this was something we could produce, and I could beat my chest for it.”
In her words, Amidu’s daughter, Emmanuella said the quest to create a memorable animation for kids spurred the new animation.
In her words, “I just wanted something different. I wanted something new. I wanted something that kids wouldn’t be able to forget about, something that would blow their minds away, something that would go viral. Touch the hearts of children all over the world, and not just children, but also adults. Because let’s be honest, adults watch our shows, and they enjoy them way more than their shows. So I like to write from my heart. I like to write things that I’ve experienced in my life. I like writing about friendship, about love, about leadership, about strength and courage. So those are just some of the things that really inspired the story.”
