In less than one week after the official trailer of the film adaptation of Prof. Wole Soyinka’s famous memoir, ‘Ake: The Childhood years’ was released on YouTube, it has recorded about 2,000 visits from online viewers around the world.
Although the filmmaker, Dapo Adeniyi, says in an interview with our correspondent, that he is not totally surprised by the general response to the trailer, he is quite delighted that it has ignited so much attention online. Most of the viewers have either phoned or sent messages via social media to express their enthusiasm for the movie.
“We needed to let people see the trailer and judge for themselves. It is such a delight to see that viewers all over the world are quite ecstatic about the film. A lot of people have reacted to the trailer with much enthusiasm,” he says.
The publisher turned filmmaker and CEO of Backpage Productions noted that though he initially uploaded sneak previews of about three scenes from ‘Ake’ on YouTube, online viewers had put pressure on him to release the trailer.
“People kept asking for the trailer, but we could not release the trailer until the film was as good as ready for the market. The colouration and the digital imagery of the film had to be as close to what we wanted. There was no way they could get it from us until we were almost done with the production,” he says.
Interestingly Adeniyi has waited for about 17 years to achieve this feat. A brief conversation between the filmmaker and late novelist, Kalu Okpi – when the latter was working with the Nigeria Television Authority – some time in 1986, had opened up an opportunity for the adaptation of book.
But the move was unexpectedly stalled by a sudden change of guard on the board of the network TV. As a result the initial plan to adapt the book for the screen, which would have translated into a full drama series in due course, was never executed..
When Adeniyi eventually took up the challenge to produce the screen adaptation privately a few years ago, he faced a serious problem: inadequate funding.
Recounting the hurdles that his company, the Backpage Productions, had to scale make the dream come true, he says, “We wrote to many people and requested financial support. A lot of people wrote to say they would be involved. Even governments indicated their interest in the project. But, at the end of the day, we did not get enough funds from them. So we decided to fend for ourselves.
“We had to actually take loans. We had to look for companies that believed in what we were doing and got them to release their own funds. We had to pawn some of our properties to raise funds to do the film.”
Adeniyi describes Ake as a big budget documentary film. Apart from the fact that the film gulped a huge budget, it had a cast of about 350 people. Even the pre-production stage of the film, he adds, was quite expensive. Although his company had a budget of N350m at its disposal, it turned out to be insufficient for the production of the film.
However, the filmmaker faces another daunting challenge in terms of the marketing and distribution of the film. For this reason, he is not likely to release the film for public consumption too soon.
“We are doing a lot of ground work now, in terms of marketing and distribution. The biggest challenge on our hands is the marketing and distribution of the film. The marketing aspect is more challenging than the production of the film because of the kind of material that we have.
“Ake is a global project. It is a screen adaptation of a book that has been read by millions of people around the world. So we need to do the marketing in different countries of the world, beginning from African countries such as Kenya, Ghana, South Africa Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Rwanda and so on,” he says.
Considering the present circumstances, he believes that it will be a lot easier to get more support from individuals or corporate organisations now than ever.
“The immediate challenge now is not as simple as people think it is. Marketing this film won’t be easy. A lot of people think it is simple, but they are wrong. If we don’t prepare the grounds well for the distribution of the film, it is going to affect it and this will be disappointing to a lot of people,” he says.
Copyright PUNCH.
