There was a moment in the early years of MTV in Africa when one of the most important questions facing us had very little to do with whether the music coming out of the continent was good enough. The music was already there. The talent was already there. Across Johannesburg, Lagos, Accra, Nairobi, Libreville, Kampala, Dar es Salaam and cities far beyond them, an extraordinary generation of African artists was emerging with its own sound, language, confidence and cultural identity.

The question was how the rest of the world would see it.

Music television had transformed the music video from a promotional accessory into part of the mythology of an artist.

A great song could introduce you to somebody’s voice, but a great music video could introduce you to their entire universe: how they moved, what their streets looked like, how their cities felt, what they wore, the worlds they imagined and the cultural references they carried with them.

MTV had understood that relationship between sound and image from its beginnings, and when MTV Base launched across sub-Saharan Africa in 2005, the visual representation of African music became inseparable from our larger ambition of taking African artists, African creativity and African popular culture into the global mainstream.

That was the world into which MTV Making the Video in Africa emerged.

The original international MTV Making the Video format had been built around something audiences rarely saw: the creative process behind the music video itself. Instead of simply broadcasting the finished three or four minutes, the cameras followed directors, artists, producers, cinematographers, stylists, editors and production teams through everything that happened before the final video reached television.

Treatments, storyboards, location decisions, rehearsals, lighting setups, performance takes, production pressure and unexpected breakthroughs all became part of the entertainment.

In Africa, we took that idea much further.

What evolved was not merely an African adaptation of an existing MTV television format. MTV Making the Video became a music-video production initiative, a filmmaking workshop, a skills-transfer platform, an artist collaboration project, an audience-participation campaign, an event property and a television franchise simultaneously.

At its best, the cameras were capturing two stories at once: the creation of a new visual world around an African artist and the development of another generation of African filmmakers behind that world.

The project sat at the intersection of much of the work I was doing at MTV at the time. As MTV’s Head of Events, Marketing and Digital Media, I headed the campaign production and served as its Creative Director and Producer, shaping not only how the initiative was produced, but how it looked, felt and travelled across the continent.

I created and designed the logo and overall brand identity, developed the creative language across television, events, marketing and digital media, and designed the stages and sets surrounding the campaign. I directed the events, headed production and staging, and showcalled the live activations.

Moving Making the Video from one African market to another meant rebuilding its physical world again and again while making sure it still felt unmistakably like one MTV property. A press launch in Accra, a music-video set in Johannesburg, a workshop in Nairobi or a nightclub premiere in Lagos might exist in completely different cultural environments, but they all needed to feel part of the same journey.

Beneath all that production machinery was a much simpler principle. African filmmakers should not merely watch how major international directors worked. They should work beside them. The production itself would become the classroom.

The roots of what became MTV Making the Video in Africa began taking shape in Accra, Ghana, in August 2006, when MTV Base brought acclaimed American music-video director Gil Green to the city for a filmmaking workshop built around an actual music-video production.

Gil came from exactly the world we wanted African filmmakers to be able to engage with directly. Raised in Miami, he had built his career inside American hip-hop, R&B and popular culture and would eventually direct hundreds of videos for artists including Akon, Lil Wayne, Drake, Rick Ross, John Legend, Ne-Yo and Chris Brown. His career would include an MTV Video Music Award for Best Hip-Hop Video for Lil Wayne’s “Lollipop,” alongside multiple BET Director of the Year nominations.

But bringing somebody with that experience to Africa only made sense to us if knowledge moved in both directions.

We did not want an international director flying into Accra with an entire foreign production team, making something spectacular and disappearing again. Ghanaian directors, filmmakers and crew members needed to be inside the production itself, working alongside Green and his team through the decisions that actually made the video happen.

Treatments, cinematography, lighting, performance direction, production management and editing became things you could experience under pressure rather than simply discuss.

The artist at the centre of that first experiment was Tic Tac, later known simply as TiC, one of the important architects of Ghana’s first generation of hiplife stars.

He had already established himself as one of the country’s leading urban artists, blending Ghanaian rap, highlife influence and contemporary production.

His hit “Menka Bio” became one of the records that helped define his rise, and his career brought numerous honours, including Musician of the Year at the Ghana Music Awards in 2004.

The song we were making was “Kangaroo.”

We shot the video in Accra with Gil Green directing, Martell Rose producing, Martin Lince as Director of Photography and Pierre Verna editing, while Ghanaian filmmakers participated throughout the workshop and production.

MTV’s cameras followed much more than the finished performance. We documented the making of the video itself, turning the creative decisions, pressures, personalities and collaboration behind it into another story. Making the Video: Tic Tac premiered on MTV Base on 23 March 2007 at 16:00 CAT, taking the experience of that Accra production to audiences across the continent.

That first production showed us something important. Skills development did not have to feel institutional. A workshop did not need fluorescent lights, rows of chairs and somebody explaining filmmaking on a whiteboard.

It could be a real set with a real artist, real equipment, real creative decisions, real deadlines and the knowledge that millions of people might eventually see what you created.

Popular culture itself could become the classroom. Accra gave us the blueprint.

In 2007, that blueprint became a much larger pan-African initiative when MTV Networks Africa and Shell came together for MTV Making the Video with Shell.

Between October and December, we took the concept through South Africa, Gabon, Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana, pairing African artists and production communities with established international music-video directors and surrounding the filmmaking process with MTV television shows, workshops, press events, premieres, performances, nightlife activations and audience participation.

The workshops dealt with the practical disciplines behind professional music-video production: scripting, storyboarding, cinematography, sound, editing, production management and the countless decisions required to transform an idea into a finished visual work.

Local filmmakers could then move immediately from discussing those disciplines into applying them inside a genuine production.

In several markets, audiences were also drawn directly into the campaign through SMS voting, allowing MTV viewers to help choose which African artists would receive the music-video opportunity. The result was a travelling ecosystem around African music video. Directors, cinematographers and producers were at its heart, but around them were artists, DJs, journalists, photographers, fans, sponsors, club audiences and the wider entertainment industry. The productions became five half-hour MTV shows, carrying what was happening inside individual cities into homes across the continent through MTV Base and terrestrial broadcast partners including TV3 in Ghana, NTV in Kenya, STV in Nigeria and WBS in Uganda.

The formal 2007 journey began in South Africa on 5 November 2007, bringing together three people who represented very different parts of contemporary music culture.

At the centre of the African story was HHP — Hip Hop Pantsula, Jabba — Jabulani Tsambo, one of the defining voices of South African Motswako. HHP had demonstrated that African hip-hop did not need to surrender language or identity in order to become mainstream. His music moved confidently through Setswana, hip-hop, kwaito, humour and storytelling, helping establish Motswako as one of South Africa’s defining rap movements.

His career would make him one of the country’s most celebrated rappers. He would win Best Video at the 2009 MTV Africa Music Awards for “Mpitse” and receive a BET Best International Act nomination in 2010, but even beyond the awards, Jabba’s importance lay in the cultural confidence of what he represented. He also understood film. HHP had studied filmmaking himself, which made him an especially interesting artist for Making the Video. He did not arrive on set seeing the video simply as marketing surrounding the song. He understood how image could become part of the music’s meaning.

Joining him was Amerie, one of the unmistakable voices of mid-2000s American R&B. Her explosive 2005 single “1 Thing”, driven by its distinctive go-go percussion, had become an international hit and the defining record of her career. It earned her one of two Grammy nominations in 2006, with Touch also nominated for Best Contemporary R&B Album.

For us, bringing an American artist of that stature into a South African production was never intended to reverse the story and make Africa the supporting act. HHP remained at the centre.

Amerie entered the African story.

The director was British filmmaker Nick Quested, already an experienced music-video director who would ultimately work on more than a hundred videos and commercials before developing an acclaimed career in documentary film. His later work would bring him Emmy Awards and an Academy Award nomination, extending his career far beyond the music-video world.

South African audiences selected HHP through the campaign vote, and the resulting production became “Music and Lights,” from his Acceptance Speech album, with Amerie making a cameo appearance.

The creative relationship between HHP and Quested embodied precisely the kind of exchange we wanted. This was not supposed to be an international filmmaker arriving with all the answers. HHP brought his own understanding of film, South African music culture and visual storytelling into the production.

The South African activation concluded with a wrap event featuring a special live performance by Amerie, allowing the world of the production to spill into performance, nightlife and audience experience.

The camera shoot might have been at the centre of the project, but by now we were building an entire cultural moment around it.

From South Africa, we moved into Libreville, Gabon, taking Making the Video into Francophone Africa and another completely different hip-hop culture.

That mattered deeply to the pan-African thinking behind MTV Base.

Our understanding of African music could never be restricted to the large English-speaking markets. Libreville gave the campaign an opportunity to enter the world of Rap Gabao, a scene with its own language, politics, creative codes and history. At its centre was Movaizhaleine, one of Gabon’s most influential hip-hop groups. Emerging during the late 1990s, the group built a reputation around music that used rap to confront questions of identity, politics, race and African consciousness while developing a following extending beyond Gabon into other African markets and Europe.

Their video “Nous” would later receive a Best Video nomination at the inaugural MTV Africa Music Awards in 2008, giving Gabonese hip-hop visibility inside one of the first major continental music-awards platforms.

Alongside them stood Pit Baccardi, the Cameroon-born rapper and producer who had become an important figure in French-language hip-hop. His career had connected African and European rap culture years before those pathways became commonplace, and he would later become an important talent-development figure in Cameroon before moving into senior leadership at Universal Music Africa.

The visual language around Movaizhaleine was shaped by John Gabriel “J.G.” Biggs, the Chilean-born director whose career became deeply connected with French hip-hop and R&B. Biggs would ultimately direct more than 200 music videos and dozens of commercials, working across Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas and later extending his visual storytelling into feature film.

His work with Movaizhaleine on “Nous” created a visual identity rooted in the group rather than imposed over it. That principle was fundamental to what we were doing. International experience only had value if it helped an African artist communicate more powerfully as themselves.

From Libreville, the journey continued east to Nairobi, where the Kenyan workshop took place on 26 November 2007.

The artist was Nikki — Sheila Mwanyigha, already one of Kenya’s recognisable female R&B voices and a personality whose career would move fluidly between music, radio and television. She had emerged in Kenya’s music scene during the late 1990s and built a catalogue that included “Niwe Wako Milele,” “Mapenzi Tele” and “Kipofu.” Her achievements included winning Best R&B Artist at the Kisima Music Awards twice, and she became the first solo Kenyan female artist to earn two Channel O Music Video Award nominations in the same year.

For Making the Video, the song was “Kipofu.” Working with Nikki was American director and photographer Taj Stansberry, an Oakland-born filmmaker who was part of a new generation shaping the visual world of American R&B and hip-hop.

His career would come to include videos for Rihanna, Jennifer Lopez, Usher, Ne-Yo, John Legend, Ludacris, Mary J. Blige, Big Sean and Wale.

Among his later works would be Jennifer Lopez’s global hit “On the Floor,” one of the most widely viewed music videos of its era, eventually surpassing two billion views.

What interested me about Nairobi was again the collision of worlds. Nikki understood what it meant to be a major East African recording artist. Taj brought another set of visual references and an international production vocabulary. Around them were Kenyan filmmakers able to watch those worlds meet and, more importantly, become participants in making the result.

The video was the visible outcome.

The experience carried away from the set was something much larger.

By the beginning of December 2007, MTV Making the Video with Shell had reached Lagos.

Nigeria was moving at extraordinary speed. Lagos was already becoming one of the great engines of contemporary African music, with artists, producers, promoters, DJs, radio personalities, filmmakers, club owners and audiences creating the foundations of an entertainment economy that would eventually influence popular culture around the world.

We did not arrive believing MTV needed to create that energy.

Lagos already possessed it.

Our role was to connect that momentum into the wider pan-African platform we were building and create another point of contact between Nigerian filmmakers and international production culture. The Lagos workshop brought local directors and production talent inside the same practical skills-transfer environment we had established elsewhere, while Lagos itself gave something back to the campaign: urgency, ambition and the unmistakable feeling that African music was accelerating much faster than much of the outside world yet understood.

That was one of the great privileges of working inside MTV Africa during those years. We could see the movement forming from within.

The 2007 journey eventually returned to Accra, the city where the original experiment had begun.

This time the artist was Tinny, Nii Addo Quaynor, one of the distinctive voices of Ghana’s hiplife generation. Tinny had built much of his musical identity around rapping in Ga, at a time when Twi dominated much of Ghanaian hiplife, giving his records a distinctive linguistic and cultural identity. He had performed from childhood and emerged nationally in the early 2000s, earning New Artiste of the Year at the 2004 Ghana Music Awards.

His song for the campaign was “Incomplete.”

The international director was Rachel Watanabe-Batton, whose career carried a direct connection to the golden era of American music-video production. She had worked at the legendary Propaganda Films and later co-founded the New York music-video company Department of Film with Nick Quested.

Her career included work involving artists such as Nas, Diddy, Usher, Wu-Tang Clan, Lil Jon, Fat Joe, Trick Daddy and DMX, before expanding further into film and television production. She would later receive a Made in NY Award for her leadership and contribution to the industry.

There was another international African connection inside the production through DJ Prince Charles, the French-Cameroonian turntablist whose reputation had spread through the European club, music and fashion worlds.

His technical command of turntablism and highly theatrical performance style made him a natural fit for the visual energy surrounding Making the Video.

The Ghana workshop took place on 10 December 2007, followed by campaign activity at the Alisa Hotel in Accra. On 14 December, we moved into Aphrodisiac Nightclub, where Tinny, DJ Prince Charles, DJ Master and E’ Double became part of the Making the Video with Shell wrap celebration.

Those nights were never simply parties bolted onto the end of a production schedule. They brought the different worlds surrounding the campaign into one room. Filmmakers who had spent days behind cameras could suddenly experience the music socially with an audience. Artists moved from set to stage. Directors met DJs. Media mixed with fans. The campaign moved naturally from production culture into popular culture.

The completed “Incomplete” video carried that Accra story onto television, while the five productions from the larger campaign became half-hour Making the Video with Shell shows distributed across MTV Base and terrestrial television partners including TV3 in Ghana, NTV in Kenya, STV in Nigeria and WBS in Uganda.

By then, Making the Video had demonstrated that the idea could operate simultaneously as filmmaking, skills development, television, events, branded entertainment, nightlife and pan-African cultural exchange.

And in 2008, we pushed it further.

The next incarnation became the MTV Making the Video Challenge with Shell, and the African filmmaking teams themselves moved even closer to the centre of the story. Between August and September 2008, the campaign travelled through South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana. Instead of simply participating in workshops, local filmmakers now competed in teams, developing treatments and fighting for the opportunity to make the actual videos under the mentorship of internationally established directors.That changed the dynamic completely.

The filmmakers could no longer stand beside the production and absorb the experience. They had to make decisions.

They had to defend ideas. They had to solve problems. They had to take responsibility for delivering the work.

The international director increasingly became a mentor rather than the automatic owner of the creative process.

The African filmmakers had to lead.

The second-season challenge began in South Africa on 25 August 2008 with one of the most influential music-video directors of his generation, Little X, later known simply as Director X.

Born Julien Christian Lutz in Toronto, X came through the visual lineage of legendary director Hype Williams before creating a style unmistakably his own. His career would eventually encompass more than 150 videos for artists including Drake, Rihanna, Kendrick Lamar, Kanye West and Rosalía, while his accolades would include MTV Video Music Awards and a BET Award for Video Director of the Year. The African artists around him reflected exactly the kind of cross-border story we wanted Making the Video to tell.

DJ Cleo — Tlou Cleopas Monyepao — had already become one of South Africa’s most commercially powerful producers and DJs and a defining force in kwaito and dance music. His hugely successful Es’khaleni series became part of the soundtrack of the era, and over the years his career would bring him a formidable collection of honours across the South African music industry. Beside him was Mozambique’s Dama do Bling, Ivânnea da Silva Mudanisse, one of her country’s pioneering female hip-hop and R&B voices. Dama had carved out space for women within a regional rap culture still heavily dominated by men, and by 2008 her stature had grown enough to earn her a nomination for Best Female at the inaugural MTV Africa Music Awards.

Completing the artist combination was Cleo’s protégé Bliksem, also known as Bleksem, representing another important part of the campaign’s philosophy: the platform had to have room for emerging voices alongside established stars.

Their collaboration became “Wena Uthini.”

The winning South African production team consisted of Chloe Coetsee as Director, Sizie Modise as Producer, Mduduzi Ndlovu as Director of Photography and Cleo Khaba as Production Assistant.

They had only days to translate their treatment into a finished production. The shoot moved through Newtown in Johannesburg and into Soweto, with Director X mentoring the crew as they confronted the pressure of translating an idea on paper into something that could survive the camera, location, artists and clock.

This was exactly where the format became interesting to me. We were no longer protecting young filmmakers from the pressure of professional production. The pressure was the lesson.

The South African chapter culminated in a video premiere and wrap celebration at Movida in Sunninghill on 6 September 2008, bringing the creative teams, artists, industry and audience together around what had been made.

The Kenyan chapter produced one of those stories whose significance becomes even more extraordinary when viewed years later.

At its centre was Wahu, one of Kenya’s defining female pop artists of the period. Her career moved between pop, R&B and contemporary East African sounds, and only months after our Making the Video production she would stand on stage at the first MTV Africa Music Awards in Abuja and become the inaugural Best Female winner, a landmark moment for Kenyan music.

Beside her was Bobi Wine, Robert Kyagulanyi, already one of Uganda’s most significant popular musicians. Bobi Wine had built a powerful following through a fusion of reggae, dancehall, Afro-pop and socially conscious songwriting, becoming known as the “Ghetto President” because of the way his music spoke directly to ordinary Ugandans and communities outside the traditional centres of power.

His extraordinary life would later take him from music into national politics, and his story would eventually become the subject of the Academy Award-nominated and Peabody Award-winning documentary Bobi Wine: The People’s President.

Together, Wahu and Bobi Wine recorded “Little Things You Do.” Their international mentor was Melina Matsoukas, then part of an ascendant generation of American directors reshaping contemporary music video. Her later collaborations with artists including Beyoncé and Rihanna would establish her as one of the most important visual directors of her generation, with a career encompassing Grammy Awards and multiple MTV Video Music Awards, including work on Rihanna’s “We Found Love” and Beyoncé’s landmark “Formation.”

But inside the Kenyan filmmaking team was another name whose future none of us could possibly have predicted fully at the time.

Lupita Nyong’o was there as a young producer, working alongside Ngethe Gitungo, Steve Kibunja and Roy Ogolla.

There was no Academy Award attached to her name then. There was no 12 Years a Slave, no global red carpets, no international movie-star mythology.

She was a young Kenyan filmmaker building experience inside an African production team, solving production problems and doing exactly what Making the Video had been created to encourage: making, producing, learning and discovering through the reality of the work.

Their production won the overall 2008 pan-African Making the Video Challenge through audience voting, beating the South African, Nigerian and Ghanaian productions.

Months later, on 25 March 2009, members of the Kenyan team were honoured at The Stanley in Nairobi, recognising what they had achieved. “Little Things You Do” would also go on to earn a Best Video nomination at the 2009 MTV Africa Music Awards.

Looking back at Lupita standing inside that production before the world knew her name carries something almost poetic.

A platform like this could never know exactly whose future it was helping shape.

That was precisely why the platform mattered.

When the 2008 challenge reached Lagos, we built the Nigerian production around a song that had already become impossible to escape.

Olu Maintain’s “Yahooze” had exploded across Nigeria in 2007 and become one of the defining Nigerian pop records of the period. The song arrived with its own dance, vocabulary and flamboyant aspirational energy, pushing Olu into continental recognition and becoming one of the signature records of the Nigerian music boom then gathering momentum.

For Making the Video, the story became “Yahoozee - The Remix,” bringing Olu together with one of Ghana’s most respected lyricists, Okyeame Kwame.

Known as the Rap Doctor, Okyeame Kwame had been central to Ghanaian hiplife since his years as one half of Akyeame. He built his reputation around lyrical dexterity, poetry and an unusually literate approach to rap, becoming one of Ghana’s most enduring and decorated hip-hop artists.

Again, the collaboration said something important about the African music industry we were trying to help accelerate.

There was no American feature required to make the record feel international. Nigeria and Ghana could speak directly to one another.

The international mentor was Dominican-American filmmaker Jessy Terrero, whose directing career had emerged from the heart of American hip-hop, R&B and Latin popular culture. His catalogue would come to include work for 50 Cent, Jennifer Lopez, Enrique Iglesias, Daddy Yankee, Maluma and Bad Bunny, with billions of views accumulated across his music-video work and a later career extending deeply into film and television.

Terrero worked alongside the Nigerian filmmakers as they built the new visual world around Olu Maintain and Okyeame Kwame.

On 19 September 2008, the completed “Yahoozee — The Remix” production was unveiled to celebrities, industry figures and media at Six Degrees North in Lagos.

Once again, the process moved from workshop to production set, from set to premiere, from premiere to television and from television back into the culture of the city itself.

The final 2008 chapter brought Making the Video back once more to Accra, where we launched the Ghanaian challenge at the African Regent Hotel on 17 September.

The Ghanaian artist was Kwaw Kese — Emmanuel Botwe, the irrepressible hiplife rapper known as Abodam, whose energy, eccentricity and fearless public persona had made him one of the most recognisable artists in Ghana. And he entered Making the Video at an extraordinary moment in his career.

In 2008, Kwaw Kese dominated the Ghana Music Awards, taking five awards including Artist of the Year, placing him firmly at the centre of Ghanaian popular culture.

We paired him with Professor Jay, one of the pioneers of Tanzanian hip-hop and Bongo Flava. Professor Jay had become known for socially conscious, politically aware storytelling, music that could work in popular culture while still speaking directly about the realities of Tanzanian life. His stature within East African hip-hop was recognised internationally when he received a Best Hip-Hop nomination at the inaugural MTV Africa Music Awards in 2008.

Their collaboration became a remix of “Who Be You.”

Mentoring the Ghanaian filmmakers was Anthony Mandler, one of the most cinematic international music-video directors working at the time.

Mandler had become particularly associated with Rihanna, directing numerous videos throughout her transformation into a global superstar, while his wider catalogue would include work with Jay-Z, Drake, Taylor Swift, The Weeknd and The Killers.

His visual language was highly cinematic, often bringing the scale and emotional grammar of filmmaking into the compressed world of the music video, and his career would eventually expand naturally into feature directing.

Four Ghanaian filmmaking teams competed for the opportunity to create the production. The winning team was led by Mantse Aryeequaye and included Gerald Ogee Gyimah of Phamous Philms, part of another generation that would continue contributing to Ghana’s creative industries beyond the campaign.

Their production became Ghana’s entry in the continental challenge and ultimately finished second overall, behind the Kenyan team responsible for Wahu and Bobi Wine’s “Little Things You Do.” The finished “Who Be You” remix was unveiled at Aphrodisiac Nightclub in Accra on 27 September 2008, returning the campaign to a venue that had already become woven into our Ghanaian story.

By now there was a rhythm to Making the Video: workshop, competition, shoot, premiere, television and nightlife. The campaign moved naturally between filmmaking and popular culture.

The 2008 campaign ultimately became a seven-episode television series, beginning its weekly pan-African run on 15 October 2008 across MTV Base and terrestrial television partners including TV3 in Ghana, NTV in Kenya, STV and AIT in Nigeria and WBS-TV in Uganda.

The finished videos were only one part of the experience.

The shows followed the filmmakers through the challenge itself: the treatments they believed in, the disagreements they had, the creative decisions that worked, the ones that failed, the technical problems, the pressure of the shoot and the extraordinary difference between imagining something and actually making it.

That visibility mattered almost as much as the filmmaking.

A Ghanaian viewer could watch a Kenyan production team working with a Ugandan artist. A Nigerian viewer could see what young filmmakers in Johannesburg were creating. South African audiences could encounter an artist from Mozambique. Tanzania could become part of a Ghanaian music-video story. Ghana could enter a Nigerian one.

We were not trying to flatten Africa into one culture.

The opposite was true.

We wanted people to understand how many Africas there were, how different Lagos felt from Accra, how Nairobi sounded different from Johannesburg, how Libreville’s hip-hop culture carried another history entirely.

But we also wanted those Africas to begin seeing one another.

Television gave us that possibility.

For the young filmmakers themselves, that meant their work suddenly existed beyond the city in which they had created it. A production made in Nairobi could become part of a conversation in Johannesburg. An Accra production could be seen in Lagos. An artist from Mozambique could become part of a South African story that travelled across the continent.

The network was becoming exactly that: a network.

Not simply of broadcast signals, but of people.

The 2008 challenge continued to live far beyond the original productions. The Kenyan team’s continental victory became a separate moment of recognition in Nairobi in March 2009, while several of the videos continued circulating through MTV Base and into award nominations and the broader African music ecosystem.

By then, Making the Video had already become part of something much larger inside MTV Africa. It existed alongside our VJ Searches, live music platforms, artist development initiatives, pan-African tours, major events and television productions.

They were different projects, but the philosophy behind them was increasingly connected.

MTV could not arrive in Africa, build a television channel around African talent and simply stand outside the ecosystem that produced that talent. If we wanted a sustainable African music television culture, we had to participate in strengthening what surrounded it. That meant artists, certainly.

But it also meant directors, producers, cinematographers, editors, designers, presenters, stage crews, DJs, promoters, digital creatives and young people who had not yet been given enough opportunity to discover what they could do.

‍Making the Video became one of those places where those worlds converged.

Looking back, the title almost understates what we were actually doing.

We were making music videos, certainly, but we were also creating rooms in which African directors could work beside people whose videos they might previously only have watched on television.

We were putting young producers, cinematographers and production assistants inside real production environments rather than asking them simply to imagine how those environments operated.

We were pairing African artists across national borders and allowing African audiences to judge creative work being made in cities thousands of kilometres away from their own.

We were creating an environment in which knowledge could move.

Creatively, I wanted every touchpoint around that process to carry the same sense of possibility. The identity, logos, television graphics, campaign creative, sets, stages, workshops, premieres, live events and nightlife activations could not feel like disconnected components. They had to belong to the same story.

For me, producing and creatively directing MTV Making the Video therefore meant thinking far beyond what happened inside the camera frame.

It meant building the world surrounding that frame: what the campaign looked like when it entered a city, what the artists walked into when they arrived, how the filmmakers experienced the production environment, how audiences encountered the events, what television viewers saw between scenes, how stages and sets felt, and how the identity travelled across live events, television, marketing and digital media without losing its coherence.

The finished videos mattered enormously, but perhaps the most enduring part of the story happened just outside their frames.

Somebody held a camera for the first time on a production of that scale. Somebody discovered how dramatically one lighting decision could change an image. Somebody watched a major international director abandon a beautiful idea because reality demanded another solution. Somebody discovered how quickly six days disappeared when a video actually had to be delivered.

Somebody learned how to direct an artist, manage a production, fight for a treatment, communicate with a cinematographer or keep a crew moving when the schedule seemed determined to collapse. Then those people took what they had learned somewhere else. They made another video, and then another.

They built companies. They made television. They directed commercials. They moved into film. They produced events. They mentored somebody else. And some of the people standing quietly inside those productions went on to extraordinary things.

A young Lupita Nyong’o was producing in Nairobi years before an Academy Award would make her one of the most internationally recognised African actors of her generation.

Melina Matsoukas would become a Grammy and MTV Video Music Award-winning filmmaker whose visual work helped define a period of global popular culture.

Director X would become one of the defining music-video directors of his generation.

Gil Green, Anthony Mandler, Jessy Terrero, Taj Stansberry, Nick Quested, Rachel Watanabe-Batton and J.G. Biggs would continue building formidable bodies of work across music, film, television and visual culture.

Alongside them were African filmmakers whose names might never have appeared in the headline but whose experience travelled into countless productions that followed.

That was ultimately the point.

MTV Making the Video in Africa was never about teaching Africa how to become creative. Africa was already profoundly creative. It was about creating access, to knowledge, equipment, professional production environments, international experience, audiences and one another, and then giving African artists and filmmakers the space to do what they were already capable of doing at greater scale.

The music was already speaking.

What we were helping to build was the visual language around it.

Before African music became the global cultural force it is increasingly recognised as today, there was a generation of artists, filmmakers, directors, cinematographers, producers and creative teams across the continent building the pictures that would travel with the sound.

For a few extraordinary years, MTV Making the Video allowed us to stand inside that transformation while it was happening.

One artist, one filmmaker, one music video, one city and one African story at a time.

MTV MAKING THE VIDEO AFRICA
Building a New Visual Language for African Music

My MTV Story Written and Recollected by
Jandré Louw

First person documented recollections and experiences as a member of the founding MTV team in Africa and as MTV Head of Events, Marketing and Digital Media at the time, Producer and Creative Director during the formative launch years of MTV base in Africa.

Jandré Louw
MTV Head of Events, Marketing & Digital Media
Creative Director & Producer
Campaign Production Lead
Executive Creative & Production Direction
Event Director
Stage & Set Designer
Production & Staging Lead
Showcaller
Creator & Designer: Campaign Logo & Brand Identity

Talent Department, Management and Bookings:
‍
Bianca Acca
‍MTV Networks Europe

Gordon Hagan
Christine 'Seven' Mosha
‍MTV Networks Africa

FEATURED AFRICAN & INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS

‍Tic Tac / TiC — Ghana
Kangaroo

‍HHP / Hip Hop Pantsula — South Africa
Music and Lights

‍Amerie — United States
Featured International Artist & Special Live Performance — South Africa

‍Movaizhaleine — Gabon
Nous

‍Pit Baccardi — Cameroon / France
Featured Artist & Francophone African Hip-Hop Contributor — Gabon

‍Nikki / Sheila Mwanyigha — Kenya
Kipofu

‍Tinny — Ghana
Incomplete

‍DJ Prince Charles — Cameroon / France
Featured Turntablist & Artist — Incomplete
Ghana Campaign & Wrap Event

‍DJ Cleo — South Africa
Wena Uthini

‍Dama do Bling — Mozambique
Wena Uthini

‍Bliksem / Bleksem — South Africa
Wena Uthini

‍Wahu — Kenya
Little Things You Do

‍Bobi Wine — Uganda
Little Things You Do

‍Olu Maintain — Nigeria
Yahoozee — The Remix

‍Okyeame Kwame — Ghana
Yahoozee — The Remix

‍Kwaw Kese — Ghana
Who Be You — Remix

‍Professor Jay — Tanzania
Who Be You — Remix

SELECTED LIVE EVENT & DJ CREDITS

ACCRA
MTV MAKING THE VIDEO WITH SHELL WRAP EVENT
‍Aphrodisiac Nightclub
14 December 2007

Tinny
Featured Artist

‍DJ Prince Charles
International Guest DJ / Turntablist

‍DJ Master
DJ

‍E’ Double
DJ / Performer

SOUTH AFRICA — 2007
MTV MAKING THE VIDEO WITH SHELL WRAP EVENT
Taboo Club Sandton
‍Amerie and HHP
Special Live Performance

ORIGINAL PRODUCTION: APRIL 2005

Abuja, Nigeria — 15 April 2005
Johannesburg, South Africa — 20 April 2005

Created as the major live celebration of the launch of MTV Base, MTV Networks’ first dedicated pan-African music television channel and its 100th television channel worldwide.

MTV NETWORKS AFRICA

‍Alex Okosi
General Manager, Vice President
MTV Networks Africa

Dudu Qubu
Head of Production, MTV Networks Africa

INTERNATIONAL DIRECTORS & CREATIVE MENTORS

‍Gil Green
International Director — Ghana
Director — Tic Tac / TiC, Kangaroo
Filmmaking Workshop Mentor

‍Nick Quested
International Director — South Africa
Director — HHP, Music and Lights
Filmmaking Workshop Mentor

‍John Gabriel “J.G.” Biggs
International Director — Gabon
Director — Movaizhaleine, Nous
Filmmaking & Visual Creative Mentor

‍Taj Stansberry
International Director — Kenya
Director — Nikki, Kipofu
Filmmaking Workshop Mentor

‍Rachel Watanabe-Batton
International Director — Ghana
Director — Tinny, Incomplete
Filmmaking Workshop Mentor

‍Director X / Little X — Julien Christian Lutz
International Director & Mentor — South Africa
MTV Making the Video Challenge with Shell
Mentor — DJ Cleo, Dama do Bling & Bliksem / Wena Uthini

‍Melina Matsoukas
International Director & Mentor — Kenya
MTV Making the Video Challenge with Shell
Mentor — Wahu & Bobi Wine / Little Things You Do

‍Jessy Terrero
International Director & Mentor — Nigeria
MTV Making the Video Challenge with Shell
Mentor — Olu Maintain feat. Okyeame Kwame / Yahoozee — The Remix

‍Anthony Mandler
International Director & Mentor — Ghana
MTV Making the Video Challenge with Shell
Mentor — Kwaw Kese feat. Professor Jay / Who Be You — Remix

SELECTED AFRICAN FILMMAKING TEAMS

SOUTH AFRICA — 2008

‍Chloe Coetsee
Director

‍Sizie Modise
Producer

‍Mduduzi Ndlovu
Director of Photography

‍Cleo Khaba
Production Assistant

KENYA — 2008

‍Lupita Nyong’o
Producer

‍Ngethe Gitungo
Winning Kenyan Production Team

‍Steve Kibunja
Winning Kenyan Production Team

‍Roy Ogolla
Winning Kenyan Production Team

GHANA — 2008

‍Mantse Aryeequaye
Winning Team Lead / Filmmaker

‍Gerald Ogee Gyimah — Phamous Philms
Winning Ghanaian Production Team