MTV To Show "Making the Video Challenge" In October

MTV base, a Pan-African music television channel in collaboration with Shell, an oil marketing company, is set to provide a global platform for artistes in Africa as its music video show dubbed; "Making The Video Challenge With Shell" takes off next month. Alison Reid of the MTV base who launched the event at a news conference in Accra on Wednesday said the initiative was designed to challenge and empower young directors and moviemakers to develop their skills to improve the quality of music video production on the continent. She said the initiative would put African filmmakers and music video directors in direct contact with their peers from the international directing scene allowing them to gain new skills and share insights. Reid said that as part of the show, there would be a competition between a team of directors from each of the regions of the continent, to come up with creative, original and conceptual videos for a given song. She said Kwaw Kese, a Ghanaian "hip hop" artiste, would partner veteran international director Anthony Mandler, Professor J., a Tanzanian artiste and a group of Ghanaian video directors to recreate a remix of "Who Be You" a track by the Ghanaian artiste (Kwaw Kesse). The show, which is the second of its kind, started in South Africa in August and has gone through Kenya and Nigeria and now in Ghana and would be aired weekly across sub-Saharan Africa on DStv channel 322, TV3, NTV in Kenya STV/AIT in Nigeria and WBS-TV in Uganda.