Femi
I could tell you some kind of story about how Femi and I met at the coffee shop but that would be a lie; Femi lives no more than a 5 minute drive from my house. So on a cold, snowy Saturday, I picked Femi up from Woolwich and we headed to Central London.
The first topic of discussion was Django Unchained and the endless amounts of controversy surrounding it. Understandably, this kept us occupied for the whole journey to Central London.
Once in the bustling hub of the city, we headed to Tap Coffee on Wardour Street; at this point we were joined by our homie Justin who was in the area. We got a table and began deciding what to get. I ordered a latte and Femi ordered… a hot chocolate. You would think, considering the nature and title of the project being heavily focused on coffee, he would get a drink that was somewhat related. No, not Femi… (He’s not really about the RMF life). Such a special guy – in fact, let me break for a moment to properly introduce Femi.
Femi is a very talented director and photographer (check his work out, obviously after you have checked out mine). I have known him for a few years now – we have a lot of mutual friends but Twitter was the catalyst for us actually meeting. Over the years, we have found we have a lot of things in common – the whole “creative” thing, the RMF way of life, music and many of things that I could rattle off. From this basis, we became friends.
So that’s Femi and how I know him. Back to the coffee shop.
We spoke about various things, from projects we’ve got planned for this year (Privé), to our mutual friends (“I have known him from young, he has always been trouble” – you know who you are), to Femi’s up-coming trip to Seville for 3 months (VCB comes to mind but in this case VCS) and the partying we will undoubtedly be doing when we visit him out there. As it did last year, his passion is taking him around the world.
Our conversation eventually lead us to talking about happiness and what it means to be happy. Femi pointed out that he feels like he is at a steady level of happiness and doing certain things can take that to a new level, but at the same time, something can occur that can bring the happiness lower than normal, like a break up or a loss. His point made me think about my life and certain situations that have occurred – I agreed that I was in a similar place, except I look at the steady levels of happiness as a constant state of joy and when something happens – either good or bad – it adds or takes away, but the constant level still remains.
We laughed off the conversation as it started to get a bit heavy, and jumped back onto the topic of Femi’s trip and what kind of photography and film projects he should do.
We eventually finished our drinks, wrapped up the shoot and headed out to Justin’s to play ‘Fight Night’.