wuruwuru
A playground for interesting ideas
In October 2020, I set up a studio to “eventually make a magazine”. But what I really wanted/needed was a space for passion projects.
This is from my journal:
The idea is to take an interesting question or topic and explore it with a visual essay, game, music album, animation, documentary, dataset or whatever best tells the story.
I hired two interns and we set off researching the history of Nigerian music. But soon, we decided to focus on album covers. Between my love for graphic design and how little documentation there is on the subject, it felt like the right angle.
Eseosa started collecting images from the internet into a database, and three researchers later, we got up to 5,000 entries. Using this, Tomiwa led a team to build an interactive website for the covers.
What started out as an essay bloomed into a visual archive.
Barely a month into the studio, I got a bug. I wanted to know what making animation in Nigeria would be like, so I took out a N6m (~$15k) loan to produce a short.
I thought we’d be done by April (2021), but the three-minute film took much longer to make. Our first screening in Lagos wasn’t until December 2022. Our second screening in London was six months later. Finally, in December 2023, we published Hanky Panky to YouTube and Minutes Shorts.
In that time, I hired a manager (Williams) and started collaborating with artist-friends. We made a collectible Ludo board with Yadi, a pilot for an animated series with Eris, an anthology of queer stories with Daniel, and more.
It’s now been almost 4 years, and together with Saratu (legal), Fu’ad & Princess (direction), Ire & Ezra (patrons) and over 50 multidisciplinary artists, we’ve produced a small catalog of films, collectibles and archives.
For our efforts, Hanky Panky was a semi-finalist at the New York Animation Film awards, Feel Good was honored by the Webbys, and the studio has been featured in publications like The Guardian, Its Nice That and Contemporary And.
My next challenge is to establish a business model.
As we made more projects, it struck me that almost everyone I worked with had some really great idea — a film, a book, a game — that they’d been thinking about for a long time. But there was either no time or money to do it yet.
I really liked these ideas, and I wanted to work on them. I felt that I could help, and my vision of the studio started to expand beyond my projects. It started to become more of a community studio; infrastructure for creative production.
Today, the studio is built around three ideas:
Passion projects are really important. We want to help independent artists bring their most personal ideas to life excellently.
Archives are essential to our practice. We want to document creative production in Nigeria to inspire our work and build an audience.
Collectibles will fund the studio. We can produce and sell exclusive products to connect with our audience and sustain the studio.
Ultimately, we want to become a global icon for great Nigerian art. And if we get this right, we’ll also be creating a new economic engine for independent creators.
Operations
I’ve spent the last decade building software products so I run the studio like a software company. We work in sprints, do stand-ups and retros, etc.
Each project is funded and run independently. We hire a production team and work remotely in Google, Notion and WhatsApp.
Our first set of projects (my ideas) were self-funded but collaborations have been different. LUDO, our first collectible, was designed to make a profit while Feel Good and E Dey Happen were funded by friends.
There’s no science to how we choose projects, but we consider:
Budget: We work on ideas we can afford to produce
Character: We like people who share our drive for excellence
Novelty: We have a bias for new stories and publishing formats
Community: We work on projects that bring people together
Documentation: Our projects create useful public information
As of today, the studio costs about $200 to run per month. We have no full-time employees, don’t rent space and only pay for internet tools.
Business
Long term, we hope to make money off films. But realistically, we expect collectibles to be our main source of revenue. LUDO made 37% profit, which kind of proves this model. Archives won’t make money, but they can inspire collectibles.
The big idea is to sell to a global audience, so we’re relying on social media, websites and events to build our market. So far, we have about 200 emails, 600 followers and 20k website visitors. About 60% of people are from Nigeria, 20% are equally split between the US and UK, and 5% are from Canada.
We’re now applying for grants to grow the business. I want to hire a full-time writer, graphic designer and marketer. Their goal will be to engage our audience and establish a regular cadence of releases.
My goal is long-term viability over rapid expansion, so my focus is on consistent cash flow, customer satisfaction, efficient operations, great partnerships, and social responsibility—traits we hope to share across Moonlight.