First day I wasn’t up at the crack of dawn and managed to sleep till 8am for a change.  A sort of productive day, kicking round ideas on the film industry in Nigeria and how I was going to make Imagine This an enticing prospect for investors to want to put their hands in their pockets.

First problem I have is there are no available statistics to show ROI on films made in Nigeria, HOAYS, which could be used as a bench mark has not been released yet so those investors are yet to see any money coming in.  Films like Phone Swap, or Last Flight to Abuja which are still fairly low budget but well made films have no readily available data to use for comparison.

It would be interesting to find out how much film revenue is actually generated at the Nigerian box office.  How many Nigerians actually go to the cinema and if they don’t why would the want to go and see Imagine This or any other film that’s not a Hollywood blockbuster? I do have a feeling that those films which were made with a larger budget, didn’t make money in Nigeria because they weren’t released on VCD.  Most Nollywood filmmakers are able to make a profit because films are made fast and cheap and sold in high volumes to the general masses through street hawkers at a price they can afford.

So the question I was asked today is: Why change the model and give them something different?” My response is, because we deserve better. Yes a lot of producers are motivated by profit and don’t care about the art or understand its impact on society but movies are more than making money.  Don’t get me wrong, I want to eat, keep a roof over my head and pay back all my loans by making a commercial film, but that doesn’t mean I have to compromise on quality, does it?

Okay, you know it’s time to go to bed, when you’re typing with your eyes closed and sentences don’t make sense. No doubt I’m going to read what I’ve written in the morning and say WTH.

Before I forget, the conclusion to my meandering thoughts is that the likelihood of keeping it in the cinema here for more than a week is slim, because the audience that it would appeal to don’t go to the cinema. And there’s no point putting it out on VCD because it would be pirated within days and you’d lose sales within a week.