By Adam Wakefield
It was towards the end of 2008 that Sidego decided to discontinue his BSc in mathematics and astrophysics at the University of Cape Town, having started it the year before. The reason he walked away was to pursue a passion of his: storytelling.
It was at AFDA, the African Film and Drama Academy, that Sidego pursued storytelling, graduating with BA honours in motion picture, in 2012. However, while Sidego walked away from a technical life academically, he used this knowledge to become a co-founder of Yastic, an SMS-based Internet auctioning start-up that, by its closure in June 2012, had a user base of several thousand people.
After he completed his studies at AFDA, Sidego joined Velocity Films as a creative researcher in December 2012, where he remained until June this year. Having founded SDGO in January, his departure from Velocity Films meant he could focus all his energy on his own enterprises.
"Up until this year, I had satiated those two itches separately; either co-founding start-ups as a technical lead, or making commercials and documentaries,” Sidego explains.
“I realised a year ago that I had the opportunity to combine these skills, working creatively with start-ups while having the background to understand their technical and professional underpinnings.”
Leveraging this, he has been able to create work that “really communicates the spirit of the start-ups”, speaks to their intended audience and uses his experience in advertising to fully combine these two worlds.
Advertising for Sidego is a useful form of storytelling because it is a creative endeavour with a goal, generally to sell a product or a brand. At the end of a project, Sidego feels you soon realise whether you have succeeded in achieving this goal or not. It is this feeling of definite success or failure that Sidego keeps coming back for.
His filming vision is informed by the principles of photography and the 200-odd videos, films, short films, adverts, music videos, and documentaries he watches every week. Sidego wants to be informed enough about what is happening in the industry to know the originality of an idea, the base of his work.
“When making content that’s under five minutes, you often use a shorthand to convey ideas and feelings. You tap into signifiers and cues like music, wardrobe, and colour grade to leverage feelings and thoughts viewers already have around certain topics or aesthetics when approaching your work,” Sidego says.
“For me, music is the most atavistic and pernicious of these, colouring the entire canvas of a piece of work. I spend a lot of time finding the right music for a project.”
Sidego’s pursuit of the perfect marriage between the technical and the artistic led him to Silicon Valley, for two reasons.
The first is the opportunity to work with start-ups, where he can feed his fascination of technology and entrepreneurship in a place synonymous with both. The second reason is to provide solutions to nascent businesses that are increasingly relying on video, where the “stakes have never been higher”, where a well-made crowd-funding video means the difference between thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“The interest start-ups have in communicating more directly with consumers has meant that they’ve appreciated working with a creative team who can take them from conceptualising all the way to the finished work that consumers interface with. An agency and production company rolled into one,” Sidego says.
“I’ve been working alongside Bernard Myburgh and Natasha-Jade Chandler, who both have an interdisciplinary skill set and entrepreneurial background, which has been invaluable in being agile and flexible enough to work in this irregular domain with companies from backgrounds as disparate as venture capital firms, phone apps, hedge funds and nutrition products.”
Given Sidego’s love of storytelling and Silicon Valley, it is not surprising that he has several tops spinning simultaneously over the next 12 months. One is a feature-length documentary, The Surrounding Game, about the ancient Chinese board game Go and the community around it. Sidego is the documentary’s executive producer and hopes to see it in film festivals internationally within the next 12 months.
“I’ve also recently started writing a feature documentary that I’ll be shooting over the coming year around the nascent but formidable world of cryptocurrency like Bitcoin and the Blockchain. Besides that, I’ll be keeping busy helping start-ups tell their stories.”
At the rate Sidego is going, the most interesting story that he can tell in the next few years might very well be his own.
For more information, connect with Sidego on Twitter.