Created as the final project for my second-year animation module, The Rise of Shango is a short 2D animated film retelling the origin of Shango, the Yoruba god of thunder, as told in the Ifá tradition. It follows Shango as the proud fourth Alaafin of the Oyo Kingdom — a warrior king who, after a humiliating defeat, reaches for darker and greater power, only to unleash a catastrophe that destroys his palace and family. Grief-stricken and broken, he flees into the wilderness and, at his lowest point, is met not by his end but by the storm itself: he ascends, rising not as a man but as an Orisha — the god of lightning, fire and justice.

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The project grew out of a personal aim — to give a lesser-known mythology from my own Yoruba ancestry the kind of representation usually reserved for Greek and Norse gods. I drew and rigged the characters in After Effects, teaching myself to create effects like lightning and fire, and modelled the village and palace on real historical images of Oyo, with narration carrying the more complex turns of the story. For me it's a modern, visual continuation of an oral storytelling tradition, reaching a far wider audience.