Thokozani

this isn’t happiness.” Peter Nidzgorski, tumblr

this isn’t happiness.” Peter Nidzgorski, tumblr.

10 Tips for Marketing & DIY Distribution – indieWIRE

10 Tips for Marketing & DIY Distribution – indieWIRE.

audience building

if i understood last week correctly, it happens like this: first, identify your core audience. second, figure out how to reach your core audience. and third, figure out how your core audience consumes media. once your core audience is on board, they willingly and enthusiastically spread the word to people within their circles (the analogy, which paints social media in a very peculiar light, was the old (?) mantra that you don’t sleep with an individual, you sleep with everyone that person has slept with. so it is with facebook friendship. although the question of who or what is the virus in the analogy is very uncomfortable.) and the project has no choice but to snowball into international blockbuster status. i think that’s what they said anyway.

so, Thokozani has many core audiences. they include: all five (jealous?) of our facebook friends; tv watchers in Malawi (AfricaMagic!); video show regulars in Malawi; people interested in me and my work; people interested in cinema and music from sub Saharan Africa; and, perhaps, a Madonna fan or two.

the plan then becomes: festival premiere, make movie available for digital download for the online empire; pursue television deal in SSA; initiate grassroots dvd campaign in English-speaking SSA; proceed walking into the sunset.

if you read this and if you reasonably fall into any of the core audience categories, you don’t need me to tell you that by Like-ing the film you play a critical role in putting the admittedly unpleasant marketing-world-as-immune-system engine into gear. in short, Like my film (capital L for now, lower case later).

new york city

room 320 of the cosmopolitan hotel. tribeca. 9:01 am. south korea 2 – 0 greece.

chris ohlson and i are wrapping up a big week here. MELVIN, a film that i wrote with chris and which he directed, got into the IFP Narrative Lab and after five days we find ourselves buried under a mountain of ideas and information. suffice it to say, THOKOZANI was heavy on my mind throughout the lab. and the result of that is a sense of clarity about where to go from here.

a plan is a very, very satisfying thing to have.

a little closer

subtitled roughcut in hand. aside from music licenses and some audio that needs to be replaced, i feel excellent exhausted. i missed the sundance deadline but am thinking i can make slamdance. it’s a big thing, getting this far. it’s not that you find out that moviemaking is easy, but you find out that it’s doable. a trite and profound understanding.

pang’ono

it turns out editing is not a hugely bloggable process. monotonous and neverending. i’ve come to think of it as railroad building. tie by tie until the playhead can make it from beginning to end. or else like chiseling a sculpture – when is it finished? – out of a block of stone.

as of 530 friday night, i have an assembly edit. 105 minutes or so. which is probably about right, i think, for an 85 minute (or so) final cut. a small miracle since it’s been a lot of one-handed editing (the other hand holding my daughter). i continue to swing back and forth between emotional extremes a couple times a day – from pondering appropriate red carpet attire to crying softly into my pillow.

another two weeks of fussing over details and i’ll be content to call it a rough cut.

first images

1. Kisswell Mandala as Innocent
2. Moureen Kabambe as Loda
3. Innocent and Loda
4. Hestings Magwede as Solomon

guerilla

After looking at all of the footage, I’m in that thrillingly wretched place where the project is more important to me than breathing. Which is a threat to my sleep patterns and my parenting. Mostly it seems solid. But we shot LP and LP, it seems, can be temperamental. Some video gliches and audio dropouts. One forum-supported hypothesis is that this could be a matter of playing back LP footage. Hopefully that’s what it is because with another camera or deck, the footage might actually playback without issue (PAL equipment, anyone?). Another, perhaps more plausible explanation, is that the footage is simply flawed because of sketchy equipment and expertise. In which case, we are looking at looping and reshoots drawn out as able over many months.

I’m finding it difficult to disclose the extent of our challenges without coming across as totally amateur and hasty and a little hesitant to share all of the dirty details. We shot everything in ten days. We had a car for four of those days. We lit our night shots with car headlights and energy saver bulbs hooked up to a car battery. There was no sound department. No production design. No script supervisor. Grips? Please. No PAs even. We had no control of our locations and had to sneak our scenes into bustling real life (ever been to a Malawian bus depot, bar or outdoor market?). We had no monitor or headphones to check audio, which came from the camera and an onboard mic. Our transportation department was a bicycle taxi. All this on top of a colossal cross-cultural experiment involving a first time director, first time crew and first time film actors.

In my mind, we nailed our movie in spite of all this and we accomplished what real films do without the very necessary tools of real filmmaking. But actually, no. That’s an impossibility. Still, our film will be what it is – which is something very different from any standard of low-budget film – and, with a little luck, that thing will be unique and that thing will be great. UPDATE: I take the last three sentences back.

in the beginning

It has taken me a long time to figure out how to talk about this project. This past February, I went to Malawi with my family – wife and two daughters. I went without any real agenda aside from a few writing projects. Those aside, I had the goal of finding a way to embed myself within the community, to try to get to know people and to become known to the people in Balaka, the town where we were living. I started off playing pool, learning Chichewa and wandering from bar to bar. Slowly I began to meet like minded individuals – writers, artists, actors, TV cameramen. I had a vague idea for a small character drama and after a couple months, I could no longer ignore that Balaka had everything necessary for a small feature film. All that was missing was a little glue to put the pieces together. It had to be small. It had to be relevant both to the Malawian reality and to my own interests and ideas. Also, it had to be in Chichewa, a language I was only just beginning to learn.

In April I banged out the script. Even though this was not my first trip to Malawi and even though I was born in Kenya and lived there for through high school (as the numbers stand now, I’ve lived in Kenya for most of my life), Malawi is a very different country. And, paranoid about the arrogance of going to a new place and presuming to capture anything at all Malawian (vs Malawians acting out my first impressions of Malawi), I sat down with Sam Kanyama Khwiya, one of Malawi’s preeminent playwrights, who, serendipitously is from Balaka. We worked the script into something that felt real and interesting to both of us and then began translating it.

It may surprise some of you to know that there are many Malawian actors. Most are involved in community theater, taking NGO and government messages about AIDS, the environment, gender, etc to the villages via drama. So, I taped a couple scenes with some actors I had met – Kisswell Mandala and Alick Gaisi – and, afterward, I remember feeling a kind of panic. Because I had absolutely no excuse not to make the movie. It was to the point that if I didn’t do it, not only would it always be an overpowering regret, but I would be unable to complain, the way we film people do, about lack of opportunity, material, collaborators, etc.

Jenny and I sat down and figured out how much we could stand to loose (given that we couldn’t stand to lose anything) and I posted a plea for help on our (now inactive) family travel blog. A few friends, old and new, volunteered some additional money and suddenly I had script, budget, location and principle actors. The snowball was picking up speed. Next, I wandered down to the Catholic TV station and enlisted a couple cameramen. Then, I met with different drama groups and held auditions.

Everything was in place. Except…the goddamn equipment. Malawi is a tricky place. What electronics are available, are not cheap. I ran around the country meeting with various people but came up empty. Finally, out of nowhere, the Goethe Institute, a German NGO that liaises with the German cultural office, offered a camera and mic. Free of charge.

So, after a week of rehearsals, we shot the movie. 10 days flat. Nothing I can write will capture the intensity of it. I will just say that even if no movie comes from the footage, every dollar kwacha was worth it.

This blog is an effort to capture a little of the road I’ve been down and a little of the road leading forward. Because as far as the project has come, the end is much, much farther away.