The MTV Staying Alive Foundation (SAF) in partnership with the World Health Organisation, United Nations and other stakeholders have supported a 65 part mini-series of MTV Shuga to raise awareness in the fight to flatten the Covid-19 curve – ‘MTV Shuga Alone Together’
Produced remotely, MTV Shuga Alone Together is a self-shot series, written and directed by MetFilm School Berlin graduate and acclaimed Nigerian actress and screenwriter, Tunde Aladese and is available on YouTube for streaming.
We caught up with Tunde to get an insight into the enormity of the task, how her career started and, how she got this epic gig.
Tunde told us: “My love for writing started with prose, making sorry imitations of any book I enjoyed in order to somehow prolong the experience that the book had given me. Cinemas weren’t much of a thing in Nigeria at the time when I was growing up, but VCR was big business and watching movies was a big family pastime.
Tunde Aladese
“There was The Sound of Music, which my siblings and I could quote in its entirety. Also, a lot of the glam mini-series type content usually centered around a woman who succeeded against all odds.
“I guess primary school drama club was my first proper sense of trying to create a narrative out of thin air and get other people to help bring it to life. But’ I can say that I fell in love with the film business, this idea of actors and directors and storytellers on screen after reading the biographies of some old Hollywood movie stars in my early teens.
“I think that was when I began to understand the process of how all that came to the screen. The possibility of anything like that being a tangible and viable career plan, came much later.”
Tunde studied English Literature at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria and her first job after graduating led to an introduction between her boss and a producer who was about to make a radio drama series for the BBC in Nigeria.
She said: “Success was not immediate but over the next couple of years, enough opportunities came my way that when an international cable company became interested in producing a Nigerian series, I actually had a little experience under my belt and could pitch myself for some writing opportunities.”
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