₦airaland Forum

What I heard is that there's nothing special about amazing grace; it just happens to be shot on film.

Do you know how many weeks of his life would have been lost to system restore if i didn't step in?

how do they hunt? by clobbering animals with clubs?

Almost! 'Poisoned clubs' would do just nicely. One can safely choreograph a PG fight with that.

animal skins and leaves for garments; that's a lot of money (and skill) that goes into costume design and construction, no?

Yes, that's what I thought at first. But then a DIY answer came to me:
You supply the actors with some basic clothing and just use superglue to cover their clothes with dried leaves. It would appear as if they are dressed entirely in dried leaves. A very convenient solution right?

that level of primitivism would probably be pre-lingual, would it not?

Yes, language may be the biggest problem. All the effective films featuring primitive tribes that I can remember (Apocalypto, The Gods Must Be Crazy) used subtitles. (1) If they speak perfect English, it's not convincing. (2) If they speak bad English, the way they speak will be criticized like 10000BC. (3) If the movie is subtitled, some people will not want to watch it. (4) I will explore the 'pre-lingual' era option; can a story be told without words? (5) What am I talking about? Pocahontas spoke and sang in perfect English (no, it's not the same; the native Indians were not that primitive)

Why would anyone sell a working battery?

have you given thought to the kind of locations/sets you are going to employ
in order to portray "an African village far far away a pretty long time ago"?

Funny that you should ask, because it's something I threw in a few days before I started writing the current outline. I just thought "wouldn't it be convenient to shoot the entire movie in a village?" I rewrote the logline to reflect that, and I got nice feedback.

Actually, it won't be that hard to get a village with lots of trees, a river, a small hill not too far away, mud or thatch huts, et cetera. Many Christian films about missionaries films are shot in remote villages. This can be part of the draw of this movie.

so then the option is to find suitable traditional dwellings where (if?) they still exist. <<YEP!>>
the challenge there is to make sure that they have sufficient electrical outlets for your use.

Power supply is also quite easy - I'll just bring along a cheap portable generator, some fuel, and maybe a fully charged inverter when (which makes less noise). We don't have power supply anywhere in Nigeria, remember?

But I'm trying to portray a really primitive human settlement, which can conveniently explain why they don't fight with bows and arrows, cutlasses, or anything that cuts - they have not been invented yet. But what will my characters wear? (Animal skins?? Leaves?) Where will they live? (In trees?) And how will they hunt animals or grow their food if they don't have cutting tools? (We'll see!)

They are especially popular in other African countries.
Nollywood is to Africa what Hollywood is to the world.
Start here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinema_of_Nigeria

It's wrong to suggest using the restore CD and having to re-download gigabytes of windows updates just because of a silly webcam driver. Use the free software known as "astra32" to find out the model of your webcam and go to the manufacturer's website to download the driver. Or better still, post the model of your webcam here and we'll help you find he driver.

I've seen the footage. She was not raped. She lost her self-control, that's all. Say no to alcohol.

And Nigeria is not as poor as those money-hungry NGO operators would like you to believe.

There's low demand for low quality food.

www.orderbay.com is great. www.graphcard.com also works, but it's more complicated and expensive.

@ibkaye: thanks!

Hi guys, I believe that a Nigerianized version of foreign movies need not be casted after foreign ones but we need only look inwards into our own history and pick out our own folklores that have been for decades similar to them troy, clash of the titans, e.t.c. A huge boomer would surely be the 'Ogboju ode ninu Igbo Irunmole' (forest of a thousand demons). Think of it like this: The main character, scenes, creatures and monsters like the sirens, ghouls, bush babies, strange lands and peolpe. Before you know it we would be having a movie that would beat the rumblings of Sango and others and have the whole world 'peeping' into the system for more stories for 'there must be more where that came from'. What 'dya'll think?

@teemy: it's not a bad idea at all. If you can do it, go for it. Before one can write a Yoruba tale, one will have to read lots of Yoruba history textbooks. One challenge is that some of these stories are copyrighted, so you have to buy the rights. Another is that by picking one culture you're excluding others.

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I've been told the story I outlined is pretty good. I'm glad because I know it can only get better from here.

@yebariba: The word "men" will definitely come up before the word "women"
Osama Bin Ladin is a man and so is GW Bush. And Saddam. Even Satan and Abacha.

just curious: how does one depict "bloodless violence"?

They'll be using a weapon so poisonous that it causes severe damage without actually cutting the body.

the other thing i would ask: musical lyrics taking the place of narration. are you a composer/lyricist?

I've written songs for church before; it's basically poetry + a melody. I'll just pay an acapella group to perform them.

on average, how much do you think these online DVD's will be selling for? Sorry, I am asking many questions

I intend to meet the prices that Nigerian movies currently sell for, both abroad and within the country.
It's really tricky to go the DVD route when the standard is VCD. Perhaps not even advisable. We'll see.

Well, many men have big tummies too. I think I'm developing one. Solution: liposuction??

The avseqxx files are .DAT files, actually.

ibkaye: The movies you make, will you be uploading some of them online?

I will post trailers and short snippets on all video sharing sites, and you will be able to buy the DVD online.

don't listen to all this propaganda that tells you that a writer "dreams". . . no, a writer WRITES.

Thanks combrazor. I don't think your views are different from mine at all: just complementary and cautionary. I do write, but not as much as a 'real' writer, and always for personal use.

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So I completed the first draft of the outline for my latest story this afternoon. I can't believe it; so simple!

Instead of a paragraph outline, it's more of a line by line outline. Just 51 lines. Looks like this:
- Xxxx X xxxx Bleep xx, Xxxxxx Bleep xx xxxx x. (51 times)

Here are some random facts about the movie as it exists in my mind today:
- It is set in a remote African village far far away a pretty long time ago.
- Lots of violence, even deaths, but it's all bloodless - just like Star Wars.
- There is an evil king, there is an outcast, lots of mystical healing.
- Where relevant, musical lyrics will be used in place of voice-over narration.

The next step is to find out whether the outline is any good, and fix the inevitable mistakes.
Then I can break it down into specific scenes that I'm going to flesh out in the script. Yipee!

Go with the white lady. You will have less problems. Long distance marriage doesn't work. Love is color-blind.

Wish I could see it too.

I'm not bashing you. I don't bash. I encourage and try to point out what is most important. B-)

Actually, there is a story there but it starts very late. There's a fight with pidgin English talk. Hehe.

Hmm, one can talk about:
Whether the characters look like human beings or toys (toys).
The accuracy of the voice sync (not bad, it's close to anime level).
The believability of the backdrop (looks like a game backdrop).
The facial expressions (basic, but acceptable).
But basically, one wants to see more. One thinks they are on the right track.

Ideas:
Try writing stories about toys or animals; maybe they will be easier to model believably?

Cheers.

Judgemental people. Always "correcting", never accepting. Even your daddy isn't good enough for you.

Thanks ibkaye. I thoroughly appreciate every little bit of encouragement I get. Please, more .

So, I got a story that some people abroad said was interesting, but it involved elements of the divine, which is always hard to work into a story if you're not making a religious movie, so I came up with another story that I thought was much more interesting in my opinion. This one is more traditional rather than religious. I've been told that it is interesting and my current collaborator agrees that removing the religious elements was the right thing to do. I'm thinking of setting it in a remote village rather than a regular town or city for various reasons.

Writing a good movie involves sitting down and 'playing' the movie in your head until it is perfect.

My advice:
Get a (very) cheap camcorder and a PC with lots of memory if editing is your dream.
Practice makes perfect, but books and Internet articles give you a foundation.

Answer: They want (1) useful feedback and (2) encouragement, and I think I'm happy to provide that.

Yes, they were wrong to shoot her. But this is Africa. We can't expect our security forces to do the 'right' thing, can we? We need to play safe.

@combrazor: excellent post. Thanks a million. about (4) - I wish there was another way though.

Still not ready for prime time. I'm sure rendering time and NEPA are a problem.

True.

What kind of freedom are they going to get in a perennial war zone? Freedom to die?