The Chief Executive Officer of Point Blank Media Concept Ltd and the President of Creative Land School of Media Arts, Theo Akatugba, has declared that if the stakeholders in the movie industry want the industry to be recognized on the international level, they need to structure the industry to meet international standard.
According to him, the stakeholders in the industry needed to work out mechanisms, employ professions to train them in the area of filmmaking, to boost the image of the industry to the outside world.
Speaking in an exclusive interview with BEATWAVES in his office in Accra, Theo Akatugba noted that without effective structures and distribution network “we cannot claim Ghana has an industry called movie industry”.
He disclosed that a number of stakeholders who have invested so much in the movie industry, were struggling to get their money back because, they have come to realize that without proper structure put in place to streamline the operations of the industry, their investment would not be profitable.
Theo Akatugba, a role model most potential movie producers would envy, said the players in the movie industry in Ghana were handicapped and had no resources to achieve their target, adding that because the players lacked resources it, was difficult for them to improve the content of their script and invest in production.
“Movies on the market today are finished products but the finishing is very bad due to lack of resources. Because we lack so many things when it comes to movie production, our movies are not seen on the international market. The stakeholders must find time and energy to develop contents. They should also desist from lifting stories from foreign movies for their local production”, he stated.
He was of the view that most of the movies in Ghana were produced by people who did not know the principles of movie production.
He condemned the various associations in the movie industry for their failure to put proper structures to streamline the activities in the industry. “The movie industry in Ghana cannot be called movie industry because it lacks creativity, distribution and multiplicity of supply and services.
“Ghana is not even recognized on the international movie industry because it has no film treaty with any country in the world. It has lost out its guest to become a film making industry because of some visionless stakeholders”.
He stressed that one of the areas which was killing the industry was poor marketing strategies which affected sales of movies on the market.
Movie producers, he said, only hawked movies on the streets of the country because the distributors lacked marketing and distribution skills.
According him, to meet the challenges ahead, filmmakers or producers must re-school themselves to enable them do away with the increasing rate of illiteracy.
Theo Akatugba, who has carved a niche for himself in the Ghana movie industry, established in the year 2002, Point Blank Media Concepts Ltd. This company began operation with the importation of TV programmes from Nigeria and the world into Ghana and in 2003, started local productions with ‘Tentacles’, a programme which became the most syndicated TV soap opera in Africa.
In the year 2009, he established the Creative Land School of Film and Media Arts in Accra, Ghana. He said, “At Creative Land, we believe that if the film and media tool is handled by persons with the required training we can be sure of a secured and better future.”
He also added that his major goal was to be able to “affect the film industry with the establishment of a proper distribution network and cause a massive improvement on how films were made in Africa, as well as train African governments on how to protect their boarders and air ways from negative foreign media. On what his recipe for success was, he said, “my recipe for success is, ‘Nothing is impossible’”.
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