Hakeem Onilogbo, popularly known as Hakeem Effect, is known in the Nigerian movie industry for making make-up for actors. In a chat with Saturday beats, the award-winning make-up artiste revealed that he sometimes gets scared of some of the effects he creates.
“Sometimes, after I have built a body prosthetic, and I wake up in the middle of the night to do something, I usually forget I was the one that built the body, so I get scared a little bit. When such occurrences take place, I just calm myself down.
“Interestingly, my children are already used to my works, so even sometimes, when they see a real incident similar to some of my effects, they call my attention to it. I always tell them that every scary thing they see on the road is not a special effect. Nothing can scare my children; they are used to seeing blood and horrible things because I create some of my effects at home.
“The only thing I can say that scares me is death. I usually think that all these struggles to survive, just to take care of my family and all the knowledge acquired and fame, at the end of it all, we are all going to die one day. However, it is better to work towards your destiny even if death is going to come at the end of the day than staying idle doing nothing,” he said.
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Speaking about how he was able to acquire the skill, he noted that he didn’t have to go through any formal training to acquire it. According to him, he learnt the art via divine inspiration through a series of dreams. Also, he stated that his most challenging and memorable effect was when he had to transform people to look like Nelson Mandela and President Muhammadu Buhari.
“When I was a child, I had it in mind that I would be a great actor; I never knew I would go into special effects at all. I ventured into the movie industry 12 years ago and I started as an actor. But I can’t act again; I can only go into movie production. However, man proposes, but God disposes.
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“Interestingly, I learnt this art in dreams; I didn’t have any form of training to acquire this skill. I started improving the skill as time went on. I was 28 years old when I used to have the dreams; I always tell people that they shouldn’t try to compete with anyone in life.
“I used to paint as a child, my parents are very proud of me. I am the only one (out of my parents’ children) that didn’t have the opportunity to attend a university, but despite that, everything still turned out well.
“Every job has its own challenges; most of my jobs that impress people are the jobs I have experimented with on my own before using them for movies. I experiment a lot. My most memorable effect would be transforming some people into President Muhammadu Buhari and Nelson Mandela. I’ll never forget these works because it is not easy to replicate someone,” he said.
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