When Toyosi Akerele-Ogunsiji had a pitch meeting at the Microsoft office in Lagos, Richard Mofe-Damijo showed up early to support a film with no title. Even more surprising? The woman he came to support wasn’t a filmmaker. She was a policy expert with zero film credits.
“I didn’t have anything to show him,” Toyosi Akerele-Ogunsiji says. “But he believed in me. I had spoken to him 14 years before that day, and he followed me to my first pitch.”
Before then, Akerele-Ogunsiji had cold-DMed Shaffy Bello on Instagram. No mutuals. No agents. Just: “I have an idea.” Shaffy replied, picked up the phone, and joined the pitch too.
Those two names — RMD and Shaffy Bello — were all she had. But they were enough.
“Because RMD said so” became the unofficial tagline that unlocked boardrooms. Within weeks, companies like Microsoft, PWC, and Evercare Hospital had signed on to back the project. Young actors and crew started saying yes. One experienced director had earlier told Toyosi he wouldn’t even read her pitch unless she had ₦30 million on the table.
She didn’t. But she had belief.
That belief became ‘Makemation’ — a tech-meets-coming-of-age family film that hit cinemas April 18. She calls it Africa’s biggest youth-led production to date. Her co-executive producers? RMD and Shaffy Bello. Not by contract, but by loyalty.
“They didn’t just act in the film,” she says. “They enabled my dream.”
Before ‘Makemation’, Toyosi Akerele-Ogunsiji had built a career in tech and education — not cinema. She returned from a trip abroad in 2022 with one conviction: the youth culture wave in Africa needed its own screen language.
So she made a list. Not of A-list stars. Of Gen Z creatives.
The project’s director, Michael ‘AMA Psalmist’ Akinrogunde, and Akerele-Ogunsiji had never met before. Their first real meeting? That Microsoft pitch, the one RMD flew in for. “When I saw him — with his dreads, his whole vibe — I just knew. I didn’t want a ‘normal’ guy,” she says. “I wanted someone who would disrupt even me.”
She found her director of photography on Instagram. Hired a 19-year-old production assistant. Named her music composer associate producer. And co-wrote the script with a young writer named Nengi Diri, who’d been recommended by Akinrogunde. The first cut of the film ran six hours. They edited it down together over months.
“We didn’t have a studio. We didn’t even have a working film model,” she says. “But we had energy. We had belief. And we walked through every wall.”
Why This Film Feels Different
‘Makemation’ isn’t just a debut. It’s a rebuke of how things are done. It’s full of lingo from the streets, Gen Z slang, and tech industry subculture. It’s made by young people and looks like their world.
The story touches on everything from artificial intelligence to education, but in a way Toyosi says is “street and intellectual” — or as she puts it, “IntelliStreets”.
“I was giving Gen Z baddie,” she laughs. “If I left this story to my old self, it would’ve been serious, hard policy. But the team—they disrupted me.”
For all its energy, the film was made under serious pressure. Toyosi slept in her office. Her husband — her “original stand-up guy” — reviewed edits frame by frame. The team juggled NYSC call-ups, weddings, and exhaustion. But no one quit.
A Movement, Not Just a Movie
Ask Toyosi what makes her proudest, and it’s not the sponsors or the scale. It’s the cast and crew.
“This is Jenny Frank’s first cinema film,” she says. “Some of these kids auditioned two months into their acting careers. Years from now, when people ask them where it all began, they’ll say, Makemation.”
For her, that’s the point. She’s less interested in traditional fame than in building a blueprint for creative ecosystems led by young people.
“This film could’ve died at the script stage. Most ideas do,” she says. “But we made it. And now, it belongs to everyone who believed before it was cool.”
