Nigeria: Lights, Camera, Action!

Creating and selling old fashion videos in Nigeria is huge business.
Creating and selling old fashion videos in Nigeria is huge business.

Nigeria’s movie industry is the third-largest in the world after Hollywood and Bollywood. They are budget, direct-to-video flicks – but Africa’s millions are demanding more, and they simply can’t get enough.

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Cast and crew receiving direction.

By Cindy-Lou Dale

When I first read of Nigeria’s movie business producing hundreds of feature-length films every year, using digital cameras, I found the subject interesting.

But when I heard that producers shoot a movie in ten days or less, on a budget of $20,000, I was compelled to investigate further.

My journey of discovery which beckoned with the promise of adventure and mystery began on a red-powdered road in the dull light of a thick African sunset.

The heat was so intense that the bush felt narrow, slender, barely able to hang on. Everything was still. The cattle I passed bleated weakly; their sounds dry and wispy, evaporating into the dust. Driving past dark mouthed huts I found myself wondering when the burnt flat savannah would ignite. I itched with sweat.

Heading towards Nigeria’s Abuja I stopped beside an open-air butchery where goat and cow carcasses swinging from trees, seethed with flies.

Videos for sale in the markets.
Videos for sale in the markets.

I bought some fruit from a vendor who had a child slung onto her soft ready hip. She enquired after my destination and asked if I could take her two little sisters home as it was on my way.

Near their village I came across people in the act of creating food, scratching in the red warm-smelling soil with hoes, spitting up fine paprika-colored throat coating dust.

“Come, missy, you must come to our house and listen to our grandfather,” one of my passengers pleaded. “His stories are about to begin.”

One by one, gift-bearing, sweat pasted members of the surrounding villages greeted the traditional medicine man, a fragile old soul, bent in the spine. The heat sighed up from the earth and curled around his legs.

He had the lean bearing and far-off gaze of someone whose world was once the outdoors. He exuded wood smoke, the singe of charcoal-ironed clothes, and an aroma of freshly tilled soil. His eyes were splintered with thin red veins.

Hands to the Fire

Catching up on Facebook and WhatsApp.
Catching up on Facebook and WhatsApp.

Well after nightfall he slumped to his haunches and stretched out his hands to the fire, resting elbows on knees. He lit his pipe, indicative that a story was about to commence.

A thick cloud of tobacco fog hung above his head. The crowd before him fell silent in anticipation. He regarded fifty pairs of bright eager eyes shining back at him in the firelight. The old man’s face becomes folded and deep.

“Not so long ago,” he began in a silken tone, “we went to bed at dusk because we had no candles.

Recall how our children went to school in rags? And when we felt the future’s only promise was that of hopelessness, poverty, and disease?

Do you recall how hard our parents prayed and how we prayed too?” His audience considered his statement solemnly.

Checking the settings.
Checking the settings.

His voice grew suitably dramatic and he pointed with the fingers holding his pipe. “Allah, the merciful one, heard our prayers and sent us a man who did not take pity on us.

A man who did not drop a few coins into our begging bowls, who instead gave our children opportunity, a man that had faith in us when we once had none.

In his wisdom, this man showed us how to tell our ancestors tales – for a profit.” He paused for effect, taking a deep pull on his pipe.

Wood smoke curled itself around my shoulders, lingering long enough to scent my hair and skin.

“And look – now we can buy candles for when it grows dark. We can now send our children and grandchildren to school dressed in smart uniforms, and our wives, they have new clothes for the Mosque.” There was much reflective nodding and agreeable whispers.

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Improvising! Who needs a stair-lift?

He went on to explain that business, like cinemas, began to close and that home video viewing imported from the West and India was substituted for in-house entertainment instead.

In 1992 an entrepreneur saw an opportunity to fill the void. Using several thousand excess video cassettes he needed to offload, he created the hugely successful and instant hit – Living in Bondage, which told of a man who was enticed into a cult that required that he sacrifice his wife in exchange for riches.

The sensation this movie created started the ball rolling and soon other home videos in this genre were being produced.

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The editorial team at work.

The rise of digital cinema has resulted in a growing video film industry. In Nigerian, it’s informally known as Nollywood and has become the third-largest in the world after that in the United States and India.

According to CNN, Nigeria has a $590-million movie industry, churning out some 200 home videos every month – second only to India’s Bollywood and more than Hollywood.

But this number continually grows as the latest estimate is that somewhere around three thousand movies will be produced this year alone.

Nollywood’s Impact on Nigeria

Nollywood blasted foreign media films off the shelves and became Africa’s new roaring lion of industry, marketed across the Dark Continent and around the world. The clever use of English rather than local languages assisted the promotion still further and assertive marketing using posters, trailers, and television advertising played a vital role in Nollywood’s success.

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To capture the right angle a little track and trailer need to be installed.

This Nollywood wonder was made achievable by two main ingredients: Nigeria’s free enterprise and digital technology.

All it required was a few thousand dollars, digital cameras equipment, some lights, and wham, Nigerian directors were fast on their way to becoming one of the world’s largest producer of films – not to mention the thousands of jobs that went along with it, as well as a sense of hope.

In an underprivileged community, where movies are produced with little fiscal backing, on shoestring budgets, and released on average within ten days, slight delays in the schedule can be disastrous.

Nigerian directors implement new technologies as soon as they are priced within their means. Cumbersome video cameras evolved to digital, which are now being replaced by HD cameras.

Straight to DVD

Computer-based systems do the editing, music, and most of the post-production work. The films go straight to DVD and VCD discs and are distributed to Nigerian stores and market stands weekly, where an average film sells around 50,000 copies.

A hit may sell three times as many. Discs sell for a couple of dollars each, which is within the means of most Nigerians and presents good takings for the producers.

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Soundmen, cameramen, PAs, technicians, people from the catering team, drivers, directors, actors, make-up artists, runners, hangers-on… it’s a crowded affair.

Several hundred movie producers whip out films at an astonishing rate, resulting in Nigerian productions outselling Western action-adventures or Bollywood musicals as they provide little that is pertinent to life in African ghettos or remote villages.

“Our new storytellers are speaking of Nigeria. Of Africa,” said the medicine man through steepled fingers. His eyes burned bright and sharp, like those of an old rooster. “They cannot tell the white man’s story. I don’t know what this story is but the white man he tells me his story in his picture films. Now we see Nigeria’s stories.”

Complications Beyond California

To date, not much about Nollywood would make its opposite number in California envious. The horn-blaring motionless traffic jams, the eyes aching smog, litter, crumbling roads, regular power cuts, street thugs demanding protection money, all the while racing against an incredibly tight schedule – complications which would be inconceivable in California.

Evidently Nigerian’s don’t count the hurdles; they learn to climb over them. Yet Nollywood producers are focussed; they know they have stumbled across a money-spinning and long-ignored enterprise. And they’re cashing in on films that put forward characters the locals can relate to, told in stories that depict circumstances that Africans understand and confront daily.

Native Nigerian Stars

Nollywood stars are native Nigerians who act in movies set in familiar locations, loaded with obligatory messages to society. These messages aim to educate their audiences as their movies deal with romance and AIDS, the occult and superstition, corruption and comedy, prostitution, and crooked cops.

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Often direction is required, which involves much gesticulation.

Until now, Nollywood has been made-up of low budget films, shot on location all over Nigeria with hotels, homes, and offices often rented out by their owners. What the films lack in quality, they make up in quantity as Nollywood is a big business in Africa.

The unique and recent addition of Tinapa Movie Studios has provided a platform for the production of films that will be shot in Africa.

As such, Nollywood will cease to remain a concept but find a domicile in the same manner that its peers in Hollywood and Bollywood have done.

Tinapa Movie Studios in Calabar in the south-east of the country is set to become Africa’s prime feature film and television drama production location. (Possibly this was the investment opportunity Wesley Snipes recently checked out in Nigeria.)

Apart from becoming a tourist destination, attracting visitors from all over the world who will be able to learn how movies are made, it will be the home of Nollywood and the venue for annual film festivals reminiscent of the Cannes Festival in France.

The force behind Nollywood is not merely about making a profit; Nollywood is telling their own stories in their unique Nigerian way, the African way.

The old medicine man said in conclusion, “Our traditional role of storytelling is strong. Even if our children do not tell of it around the fire to their children and their children’s children, as we do now, it is passed to many more. Just in another way.”

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Make-up and lighting check.

He took a mouthful of bread his daughter had presented to him earlier and a sip of tea from an enamel mug, mixing the two together in his mouth, like a concrete mixer.

He seemed to be thinking then said, “I can now sit under my acacia tree and watch my goats and my wives working in the field.

Our children have secured the future of our past. And the story of our people will be told well.” Minutes later the old medicine man had nodded off into a broken chicken-neck sleep.

When to go

Nigeria’s climate is a mixed bag, with the coastal regions getting the rains in the winter, and the northern plains attracting precipitation during the summer months. Temperatures cool down between November and February.

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