Some incredibly talented Nigerian students who shoot sci-fi movies with their smartphones have been unveiled.
‘The Critics’, a team of young students from Kaduna state, has started making waves after repeatedly shooting widely accepted sci-fi movies with smartphones.
The eight-man team learned special effects from YouTube tutorials; used a smashed mobile phone as camera; made a broken microphone into their tripod; and opted for an improvised hairdryer to initiate the heavy winds.
They also defied regular internet and power outages and deployed video editing techniques into their production processes to portray the desired movie scenes while standing in front of just a green studio fabric.
In an interview with Reuters, Raymond Yusuf, a member of the team and a student, spoke on the crew’s success strides and noted that their efforts have not been without challenges.
“The computer is really slow. Like, it takes time to render. A five-minute short film took us almost two days to render. Apart from this, electricity here is pretty poor,” Yusuf explained.
The young filmmakers have made a name for themselves online, a feat that could potentially earn them lucrative careers in the Nollywood industry as professional film producers.
The crew’s ingenuity earned them the support of a popular producer in the country who initiated a fundraising campaign in their name and amassed them nearly $6000 with which to purchase new equipment for more quality films.
Nasir El-Rufai, Kaduna governor, who recently invited the team, praised their creativity. He also offered them government support and constituted a team of senior officials to work out “the details with their families.”
“The main aim was not for our stuff to go viral. We just wanted people to see that there are kids in Kaduna doing something different. So that was just the main. But, all of sudden, it’s just happens and blew our minds,” Godwin Josiah, a member of the team, said.
Below is one of their short films.