Since January, Obed Afram and O8’s cameras have travelled from a golf course in Accra to Abidjan’s stadium concourse and a business summit in Istanbul.
Between shoots, the same small crew filmed a Mercedes-Benz unveiling and a skincare ambassador signing. They gathered reels, vox pops, and street interviews for Ghanaian television, too. The company’s archive would take days to sit through.
He came to the trade later than most of his peers. Afram studied for a Bachelor of Science in Marketing at the University of Professional Studies, Accra. It was a business degree more commonly found behind a desk than behind a camera. It was only in 2020, while he was still a student, that he picked up photography and videography in earnest.
The man who gave him his first real opportunity in the industry went by Sam8, and Afram has never been shy about the debt he owes him. “He taught me before I knew what I was even learning,” Afram says. “O8 was never just a name. It was me saying I wouldn’t have started without him.”
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When he struck out on his own on the first of December 2023, he named the company O8 Media. O stands for Obed; 8 stands for Sam8, a small act of homage folded into the letterhead.
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O8 Media built itself on smaller assignments and collaborations with individuals, influencers, and local brands that targeted a domestic audience.
That client base still exists, yet it now shares space with corporate brands, multinational companies, and media organisations. The company’s work has followed those clients abroad several times this year. This pace was not kept twelve months ago.
Moreover, observers now describe the company as less a videography outfit and more a communications operation in film.
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Afram notes that content could bridge a brand with its intended audience. This audience is precisely the group it aims to reach. “The difference this year is that the brands asking for that bridge are no longer just Ghanaian ones.”
Not all of the work has come from the influencer economy. In May, the team shot the Guinness Ghana Annual Golf Championship, the kind of buttoned-up corporate booking that requires a different register than an influencer’s car reveal, and a sign that the company’s range is being tested in more than one direction at once.
The largest share of the growth, though, has come from a standing arrangement with the Media General Group: reels, personality features, street interviews, and market vox pops across TV3 Ghana, Onua TV, and 3Xtra, with cameras present at the Telecel Ghana Music Awards, Creator Circles 2.0, parliamentary proceedings, the 3FM Gobɛ Festival, Onua Showtime, and The Afternoon Show, alongside personalities including Nana Ama McBrown, Anita Akua Akuffo, Godwin Nambo, and Ms Nancy.
Afram talks about the next few years in terms most 24-year-olds would find embarrassing to say out loud: he wants O8 to be one of the best on the continent at bridging brands and organisations to the audiences they are chasing, and he does not confine that ambition to Ghana, or even to Africa. “Six months ago I would have called this an ambitious year,” he says. “Now I’m not sure ambitious is a big enough word for what’s coming next.”
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Whether that turns out to be the pan-African bridge he has set his sights on, or simply a very good run for a young Ghanaian production company, is not something six months of client bookings can settle either way. Given how he has spent the last three, it would not be wise to bet against him.
