The Making of Nairobi Half-Life

Celebrating the people behind the cameras

The Africa Magic Viewer’s Choice Awards was truly a success for Kenya – particularly for the crew from Nairobi Half-Life who took home four awards this year. What stood out were the categories that they scooped at the awards, all belonging to the artistic aspects behind the cameras, namely the art director, the lighting director, the cinematographer, and the make-up artist. Nairobi Half-Life raised the bar for Kenyan film when it came out in 2012 and the fact that it can still bring home awards in 2014 is a testament to the fact that we haven’t seen anything of its quality since. We caught up with the winners to tell us what it took to piece together a beautiful part of Kenyan film history.

The Art of Trashing a Police Cell
As an art director, “one is an architect, an interior designer, a handson worker, while overseeing and supervising all elements of the Art Department” says Barbara Minishi. Working with the Production Designer, she brought out to life the visual identity and look of the film, managing props, costumes, and the construction crew.

With a portfolio of fashion photography including Nairobi’s Mwangalio Tofauti and the Picturing Wanjiku photo exhibition, one can understand why she was featured in Al Jazeera’s Artscape, a documentary on prominent African photographers. She has been in the photography and film industry for the past 10 years and undertook a Film Africa/DW Akademie Development Workshop on Film in 2010 where the idea of
Nairobi Half Life was conceived.

Her work in the film included tireless hours setting up scenes. “These scenes have to be created by the Art Department. For example, people assume we shoot the police station, cell and toilet scene in some already constructed place, but no, it was all designed and each element was put in place,” she says. The film also features the aptly named Vultures Travelling Theatre that entices Mwas, the lead, into acting scenes in the city featuring city council askaris and robberies in broad daylight, which the art team designed as believable snap-shots of Nairobi.

“The entire process was memorable”, she says and it is clear that regardless of the challenges faced, she enjoyed every bit. “When making the toilet set, all the crew were equally fascinated, disgusted and in awe of what the art team did. I did enjoy building the police station as it was a lot of work. The shack where Mwas was acting out the Kill Bill scene at the beginning of the movie was also a nice but delicate set. We had to ensure he would be safe when he fell through.”

The thread linking all the Nairobi Half Life winners is their appreciation of all the departments that were involved. “It is an honor to be recognized by AMCVA. It truly was a defining experience to work on Nairobi Half Life and I put my heart into all that I did and worked with a team of beautifully passionate people who were solid in their vision,” says the humble Barbara on AMCVA 2014’s recognition of her work.

The lights before all the camera and action
Mohammed Zain has been in the industry for the past decade and he tells us that his mastery of the art of lighting stemmed from his love of photography. He studied Animation in India but after moving back to Kenya, his passion for photography took over. “I learned the lighting aspect from taking photographs,” he tells us. Nairobi Half Life was his first experience in a feature film and it is evident that it was not short of talented people that genuinely loved what they did and did it to perfection.

The daily routine for the crew was grueling as they had to wake up at the crack of dawn everyday to be on set by 6:30 a.m., have breakfast and watch the rehearsals keenly. “This helps to see the actors’ movement and position, for example, how they sit, when they stand up how they move so that as a cameraman you are prepared for the actions.” Finally he would set up the lighting and camera and shoot until nightfall. There was as much suspense behind the scenes as there was in front of it he says. “I really enjoyed shooting the end fight scene, and the other when the gang met up with Dingo and everyone pulled out their guns, it was amazing to shoot,” says Mohammed.

One of the scenes of the film, that viewers may attempt in vain to etch out of their memory, is when Mwas is in a prison covered in human waste. Fortunately, Mohammed assures us that it was all props. It comes as no surprise that this was the worst scene to shoot for him from an aesthetic point of view. “Even though it was so clean because everything was props, man they looked so real. Kudos to the art department,” he says

Mohammed’s passion for the equipment is evident as he raves about the high end Arri Alexa digital film camera that he says “accentuated everything it captured especially because of its fantastic low light capabilities.” Using Cooke lenses on the Arri Alexa camera, the six members of the camera department created the sharp quality of the film. The camera was imported from Germany and it was the first time he had used such an advanced camera. It was brought in by one of the film’s sponsors who trained the crew on how to operate it. “Every week, we were in rotation so that everyone knew how to work the camera. The sponsors also brought in software that we could update. It was very exciting because of the sensitivity of the camera to light. When it was really dark, the camera shone and captured small lights,” says Mohammed.

Carrying the state-of-the-art camera, Mohamed spent many scenes propped on a crane to capture scenes from an elevated height.“I sit on one side with the camera and on the other, there are weights to counter balance my weight. It is controlled manually by Kioko, our crane operator.” Most of the remainder of the scenes were shot using an ‘easy rig’. “This is where the camera is mounted on the body so that you don’t feel the weight of the camera on your shoulders, therefore there is no strain on your shoulders because its weight is evenly spread on your upper body,” he explains.

Christian Almesberger, the winner of Best Cinematographer, was like a mentor to Mohammed. The former began his film career as a film ndeveloper, was processing film in film labs and is considered one of the best focus pullers in the world, having worked on films like Perfume, Resident Evil, Cloud Atlas and Aeon Flux amongst others.

Due to the team spirit on set, many roles wove into each other and Mohammed and Christian often found themselves doing both lighting and cinematography at the same time. “The awards should be for every single person in the relevant fields because it would not have been possible to win without every one’s efforts.” Mohammed tells us. “I cannot speak for the other crews but in Nairobi Half-Life, we’re like family and we formed strong bonds. We shot for a month and by the second week we were exhausted. We spent endless hours at the set. It was challenging but it made us form strong bonds.”

The bonds made between the crew are still strong. Mohammed is currently working on some short films with Tosh Gitonga, the director of Nairobi Half-Life. “I am also doing commercials for Cadbury and Vision 2030 among others,” he says.

Painting faces of Nairobi’s street-life
Make-up on a movie set is less flowery than one would presume, as we found out when looking into the work of Elayne Okaya in Nairobi Half- Life. A trained lawyer, she is self taught in the art of regular and special effects make-up. Her big break in the film industry came in the form of Nairobi Half-Life. As if by fate, she was drawn to special effects makeup a year before the shooting of Nairobi Half-Life when visiting London. “I spent an entire day in a special effects make-up shop called Charles Fox buying books and FX makeup. I took them home and basically taught
myself with my new books and kit,” she reminisces.

The action packed film includes plenty of violence and Elayne had to create cuts, scars, bruises, bullet wounds and even blood oozing from the mouth. “Nairobi Half-Life was a particularly challenging project, one guy (Dingo) even gets impaled by a wooden stake in a fight and bled out. It
had to be very life-like.” Unfortunately the particular make up required, or FX kit as it is known in the industry, is not available locally. “I had to buy my entire FX kit abroad, so needless to say, it is a bit of an expensive venture. I know that some people try to make things like blood from locally available stuff like food color, paint and tomato sauce but the thing about our audience is that they are very smart and they expect effects in film to look as real as possible. They cannot be fooled.”

Elayne uses Artex (a surface coating most often used on ceilings) to create wounds, liquid latex for wrinkles and blood capsules, and a lot of others materials from specialized special effects manufacturers like Kryolan, Graftobian and Ben Nye. A particular look that was difficult to achieve was Mwas’s forehead wound that was a result of being bashed with a bottle. “It was a bit of a challenge because of continuity. I had to
create the same wound for about ten days, sometimes more than once in a day because in film, we never shoot in the sequence that you end up seeing on TV. That was tricky because it had to look the same every single time.”

Going to the Africa Magic Viewer’s Choice Awards she came less prepared than for the set of Nairobi Half-Life. “I hadn’t prepared a speech! Everything that I said on stage came right off the top of my head. I really am honored to have been in the same category with some really amazing makeup artists. Israel Moses from Nigeria who was nominated in the same category came up to me to congratulate me after I won and that was particularly touching,” she says.

Elayne is currently pursuing television production ventures such as Mashariki Mix that airs on DSTV and hopes to study film professionally soon. “I will however, take up the occasional makeup project when time allows,” she says.

 

By Amal Mohamed