The Nollywood (Nigerian film industry) is often considered a multi-billion dollar industry because of the rate of the business growth recorded over the years.
The Nollywood industry is redefining and booming the African life and enlightening the Western world on how interesting the African continent is. So many investors have also become interested in this ever growing industry that one begins to marvel at the future of the Nigerian entertainment world.
Different Ways You Can Join The Nigerian Movie Industry
• Actor/actress
• Movie director
• Script writer
• Promoter
Steps to Starting Movie Production Business in Nigeria
• Register your business
As with every business, making your business legal should be one of the first things you need to do as a business owner. It has so many advantages including helping you access loans and grands in the later run and protecting your products from copyright infringements.If you'd be running your business in Nigeria, the steps you need to take include:
- Choosing a business name: You can do a quick Google search after selecting your name to make sure no other brand is using it. Doing this will help save you the stress of getting your name disapproved by the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC).
- Register your business with the CAC: The internet has made it very easy, you can now creat an account online, submit your business name and get it approved (or disapproved) in a matter of minutes. Kindly check out our precious post on how to register a business with the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC). It'll guide you on all you need to know as a beginner.
- Get your Taxpayer Identification Number (TIN): The TIN is a unique nine-digit number used in identifying an individual, business, or other entity in tax returns and other documents filed with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
- Go online: Having an online presence as a brand will help you reach more people through the power of social media, search engines and more. You can get a professional looking website at a very affordable rate, create a YouTube channel and start collecting with millions of internet users all around the world.
• Create a business plan
A business plan is simply a written document describing the nature of the business, the sales and marketing strategy, and the financial background. It should also contain a projected profit and loss statement.
Having a business will help you in many ways including accessing business funding like grants and loans. It'll also help you in maintaining business focus while fueling your ambitions in the course of running your company.
• Raise some funds for running your film company
Now that your business plan is set, you can start searching for sponsors. Getting people to invest in your business is very possible, but you need to first prove to them that your business is worth being funded. Every good investor will want to know how long you've operated, and how much profit you've been able to generate.Your capital, expenses and profit should be well documented for reference purposes. There are several ways of raising capital as a startup including personal savings, crowdfunding and more.
• Get a team
You'd be needing a minimum of 4 key personnel to set your business running. At the start up phase, you might be delivering some of the key roles yourself, but as the company grows, you'd definitely be needing more helping hands.Key personnel to set your business running:
- Head of development (to find and assess scripts)
- Head of production (to make sure the films are created on time and on budget)
- Head of film sales and distribution (to supervise crowd-funding and self-distribution in addition to the traditional sales routes)
- Head of post-production (to navigate the technical thrills and spills of the edit, and make sure the long list of film deliverables are met)
• Distribution of your films
You shouldn't embark on a filmmaking career without having a clear distribution strategy. As we all know, digital technology has democratised the filmmaking process – anyone with very few bucks can make a movie.While this is great (at least you can now get those your wonderful stories on screens), it has also flooded the movie market with inferior products, meaning traditional distribution routes are choked with so-called product driving down prices.
Fading out
After publishing the article on how to join the Nollywood industry, I and Clifford started getting so many emails from 'talented' producers, searching for advices on how to distribute their movies. One shocking fact was that a number of them had already secured finances, but had no distribution plans.The irony of the whole things lies in the fact that while making of movies have become cheaper with the help of the internet, movie distribution has become more difficult than ever.
What have I missed? Don't forget to drop us a comment and share with your friends. Meanwhile, I think you'd enjoy our post on 9 Nollywood actresseses that sacrificed their acting careers for marriage.
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