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The story behind the viral Kumawood Mortal Kombat movie
Pulse.com.gh caught up with the man behind the movie that is making waves online.
The Kumasi-based artist, known to industry players as 'Committee', is the brain behind 'MK', a Kumawood production modeled after the popular video game franchise Mortal Kombat.
A trailer for the movie, shot on location in a forest at Ashanti Region's Nkawie Mpepetia, was released online this week and has already received thousands of hits in views and shares.
"I'm very happy," the modest Amidu tells Pulse.com.gh in an exclusive interview. "I thank God for making Ghanaians accept it. It's not easy at all to produce something that both media people and fans will find worthy of praise."
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The 34-year-old director, a lifelong fan of video games, says he spent his early working life operating a 'Game Center' - a cultural phenomenon in the early 2000s that saw young people pay money to play a wide range of sporting and martial arts games on different brands of consoles.
Mortal Kombat, the 1992 creation of Chicago-based Midway Games, was his addiction. And since venturing into movie making in 2010, he has always dreamt of recreating that experience.
"Since I entered the business, it has always been my target to shoot a Mortal Kombat movie," he says.
He was so determined to achieve this target that he put his money where his mouth was. Faced with the challenge of a lack of sponsorship, he dug deep into his own pocket to fork out almost GHS 10,000 to finance the project.
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He employed a Kumasi-based cast and crew - his 'boys', as he calls them - to recreate the much-loved Mortal Kombat world: from plot to characters to costumes to fighting sequences.
At the end of production, which took close to a month, Committee - an auteur who does cinematography, direction and editing - got to work to shape the entire project from the cutting room.
The result has been a production whose trailer has been widely hailed as entertaining and commendable given the well-documented public complaints of poor quality productions churned from Kumawood week after week.
The director says he hopes to ride on this new found fame to attempt more daring projects. He is a fan of action blockbusters from Bollywood, India's multi-million dollar movie industry. "I watch and study a lot of Indian action films to learn and improve," he says.
What about Hollywood? "I'm a big fan of the Fast and Furious series," he says.
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So, can he do shoot a Kumawood movie featuring fast car chases?
"Why not?!" he says. "I can do it, but it's all about money. I lack sponsorship and I hope it changes soon. Once corporate bodies support, there is a lot that can be achieved."
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Committee is excited about his next project, titled 'Jungle Girls' - a movie about ladies who have to fight their way out of a forest they are stuck in. Unlike MK, this movie is based on an original concept.
He says he is unworried about criticisms about MK's unoriginality. "This is not the first time someone has done a movie based on another work," he says.
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"If you notice, any movie or series that becomes a classic gets remade in many ways and in many places, and so this is very normal. We are all fans."
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