Career Highlights 2025
From Left to right: Bafta winner Rakie Ayola, Eno Enefiok and Adam Smith at the BFI London Film Festival 2025 for the world premiere of Hope Is Lost
Eno Enefiok leading Master Class at London Screen Academy
It’s crazy how quickly time flies! This time last year I was still in post-production on my award nominated stop-motion short ‘Hope is Lost’ which had it’s world premiere in competition at the 69th BFI London Film Festival 2025.
When I started working on the project in 2020 with little to no animation experience, I was naive about the grueling task I had just appointed myself, but determined to see it through.
It took me five years to make the puppets, build the sets, animate, edit. It was a lot, but I’m glad that I did it, because I learnt more about filmmaking during the making of this personal project than I have in my decade+ career in the industry.
So why stop-motion? Because I tried making the film the traditional way and I just couldn’t get past step one: get money.
I thought raising funds would be easy after the script, formerly called ‘Asylum’ won ‘Best Live Script Reading’ at the Bafta qualifying British Urban Film Festival (BUFF) in 2019.
Funding applications aren’t fun, but looking back now, I’m glad the live version of this film did not get funded because if it did, I’d never have the animated version which feels more raw, authentic and personal. Animation, especially stop-motion, has this this transcendent power to compel and retain the attention of an audience that’s next to impossible to replicate with live action, especially in this day an age of context created for second screens.
Completing the film and getting it screened at such a prestigious festival is an achievement I’ll treasure forever.
But apart from completing my animation project, I was invited to run a Master Class at the London Screen Academy which was an amazing experience, I hope I get the opportunity to do more of these because it was really rewarding to pass on any advice from my experience to the next generation of story tellers.
Another highlight is that the script for my unproduced short ‘Cassette Tape’ made the long list of the Black Filmmakers Fund 2025. Even I was unable to secure the funding, making any kind of selection list is an achievement to be celebrated. I’m manifesting that this will be my next narrative short, and this time it will live action although I’m still going to be working on more animations in 2026 so watch this space.
I was also blessed with opportunities as 1st Assistant Director. I finally got to work on a music promo with Stormzy, he was a featured artist but is still counts.
I got to lead the sets of more branded films and social ads for brands like: Google Pixel and Crocs. I also worked on this powerful TVC for TFL and I can forever say that I worked on the first ever TVC for Dash Water.
All in all 2025 was pretty great. The goal for 2026 is just to continue to build my brand, my portfolio and work with more awesome and inspiring humans.