Every filmmaker has a strategy or medium with which they express their messages. For Daniel Alaka, the creative mind behind About Sarah, 2D animation suffices to capture complex human emotional experiences such as love, infatuation and heartbreak.
About Sarah is one of the short films that screened in competition at this year’s edition of S16 Film Festival, an annual event that brings together some of the continent’s boldest indie filmmakers and creators. Although S16 is relatively young, it has already built a reputation for elevating stories that may not receive immediate mainstream attention, prioritizing stylistic experimentation and encouraging filmmakers to push beyond conventional boundaries. Alaka finds a fitting platform here; he clearly understands the festival’s ethos and delivers a brief yet contemplative meditation on romance and emotional attachment among young people.
About Sarah interrogates love and romantic attraction through the eyes of an anonymous young man. The young man, a creative writer, ruminates over his meeting and dalliance with Sarah, a lady he meets at a book club, comparing her to past romantic interests. Alaka frames this conflict around the idea that love often has less to do with the individuals involved and more to do with the ideals they project and believe in. Over a virtual conversation with Culture Custodian, the filmmaker discusses his work, techniques and shares a bit of his journey so far in the creative world.
This interview with Daniel Alaka has been edited for clarity.
What was the journey to creating this story, considering the use of animation as its medium?
The script began as a short story I wrote in my final year of university. I was part of the writers’ society, and we were organizing a conference, so everyone contributed pieces to write or perform. It was a loosely written piece. The theme was emotions, and I wanted to explore not love exactly, but infatuation. That was when I came up with the story about Sarah. A year later, after making my first short film, which is currently on YouTube, I reread the story and felt I could develop it into a script and possibly animate it. I wanted a new project that felt more serious than my first one. I expanded the story into a proper narrative, started storyboarding, and sent it to a few people to proofread. It’s a simple 2D animated short that I created myself. I focused mostly on animation and framing. After work, I devoted about two hours each day to it. The entire process was fairly loose but not easy. At some point, I stopped working on it because I started attending the EbonyLife Creative Academy, and balancing that with my job became too hectic.
You titled this About Sarah (a pretentious thesis on love). How does that title capture the philosophical argument you are making about love, and why did you choose to frame it in such self-aware terms?
I called it About Sarah because it focuses more on Sarah than on the narrator. It’s nothing more complicated than that. As for the subtitle, in the context of the film, it reflects the narrator, who is emotionally aloof and realises that his love for this woman is shallow. Even if he intends to keep loving her, he doesn’t really know her, and he tries to rationalise his feelings by coming up with reasons. I feel that, although these reasons are interesting, they don’t mean very much in the end.
About Sarah partly feels like an intimate reflection on love, identity and humanity. To what extent do the projections of the film reflect or intersect with your personal life experiences?
It does reflect some events in my life. The moment when the narrator talks about the women he’s been attracted to is drawn from my own experience. I’ve had many crushes since childhood and still find myself attracted to people even if I don’t tell them. Like many films, it’s partly connected to my personal life as well as stories I’ve heard from others. It’s a blend of different life experiences: my own, those of my friends, and those of my family.
According to the film credits, you featured the voices of Oshla Abimiku as narrator, Glory Ogbonnanya as Sarah, Lolade Alaka as Suri, and Ebun Alaka as an unnamed character that exclaims in reaction to the narrator’s profession of love for Sarah. Could you speak to the nature of your relationship with these contributors and why it was important for you to entrust these particular voices with carrying the emotional and narrative weight of the film?
I will start with the last two. Lolade is my sister and Ebun is my brother. I did not really approach the project with much fanfare, and most of the resources I used had to be free, so I relied heavily on collaboration. My sister’s role was small, and she was happy to help, as was my brother. The voice of Sarah belongs to Lolade whom I met during NYSC. I liked how soft her voice was. I felt that softness made the character feel real. Oshla is also a good friend of mine, an older friend I met at Covenant University, where we both studied Computer Science. He has always been interested in voice acting. I had someone else in mind for that role initially, but when I randomly asked him to do a reading, I realised his voice had the attitude I wanted: a kind of dispassionateness that feels born from tragedy rather than boredom.
Could you walk me through your backstory as a creative, storyteller and animator?
I began writing short stories back in my 100-level and even experimented with full novels on Wattpad. Around the same time, I tried to teach myself animation, but I did not make much progress until I finally developed a proper graphic foundation that helped me learn how to draw. I started doing short animations and eventually moved to creating comics. In 2019, I finished my first comic series titled Virgin Mary. It is a religious satire about a girl from a deeply religious home who goes to university for the first time, and it became my way of questioning and reflecting on issues around Christianity at the time. The series is still running, and working on it gave me the confidence to start a second comic called Sweetheart. Also in 2019, I received a gig from a foundation, and it was the first time I truly had creative freedom. I was given scripts and voice recordings, but the entire creative direction was up to me. Each animation was about four minutes long, almost like a short film, and I handled every part of the process by myself. Even though they feel a bit dated now, I am still very proud of them. That experience eventually led to my first short film on YouTube, where I focused on visuals and pure storytelling without any dialogue. Outside my personal projects, most of the work I do for clients these days is in comics rather than animation.
What are your plans for this film beyond S16, perhaps in terms of distribution across more festivals? Or are there any intentions to expand it into a feature-length film for better prospects?
I plan to continue festival runs for as long as possible until my next film comes out. I am still new to the festival circuit, and I don’t even know what other ways in which I can distribute outside the festivals. There’s also no plan for a feature-length any time soon.
This film already introduces you to audiences so people now have an idea of what you are capable of as a filmmaker. But beyond this, what broader cultural or philosophical conversations do you hope to centre in future works, possibly ones that follow a similar structure and style?
I think I might reconsider doing more stories about different kinds of love or romance, even though I am not typically a romance person. I also want to tell stories about religion because it is an area I have studied for a while. We also need more stories that centre children in Nigerian society. In general, I am committed to making films with depth, reflecting the power of animation in simple terms. The style of About Sarah is my way of challenging the idea that animation must be grandiose, polished, and heavily funded. There are many low-budget animated films that are impactful. I have always believed that one of the ways the animation industry in Nigeria can grow is by not trying to do too much too quickly.
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