How smartphones boosted the Nigerian movie industry
Over the past twenty years, Nigerian films have taken more and more momentum in the film industry. From the year 2015, this film industry is the second largest in the entire world. They surpassed Indian Bollywood films a long time ago. Their industry was worth over five billion dollars in 2014, with over 1,500 movies coming out each year.
Development of the Nigerian films industry
Though Nigerian movies have existed since 1960, low-budget Nollywood films have experienced their expansion with the help of modern technology. With the use of the Internet and recorded with smartphones, these films are recorded with smartphones and distributed via websites and DVD copies worldwide. With creative ideas and innovations, nigerian films earn quite a lot using minimal budgets. Self-taught actors and directors have made enviable careers, and they now produce new films every few months, with budgets that are less than $ 300 per film, all with the use of production and distribution that are different from traditional models. Props are made from waste materials found around them. A lot of self-taught directors did not have enough financial resources to complete their studies, but they found ways to develop in this niche and make films that are known on a global scale.
How exactly did technology help
From simplifying ways of recording through smartphones, as well as editing and retouching frames and sounds through applications, to the distribution of movies in which the Internet plays a large role, the technology did help a lot. Using just they imagination and applications they downloaded free, Nollywood directors made Nigerian movies known worldwide. Jongo Love, a world-renowned love movie, was filmed entirely on the Nokia Lumia 1020. After worldwide promotion through social networks, the movie was posted on Youtube, and it has been seen over 190,000 times. This opened the opportunity for anyone who wants to enter the film industry, so they can do it with minimal technological support, making movies that excite broad popular masses.
Nollywood films are already promoted via the internet through social media and trailers, and the goal is now to sell them online. Since you can get a good bandwidth speed for a low cost, more and more people are turning to streaming movies instead of purchasing DVD editions. It also leads to the expansion of sites offering a stream of Nigerian films for all fans of the Nollywood genre and other film lovers.
Nigerian movies today
With the rise of technological innovations and their availability to broad masses, these new wave films have improved quality, bigger budgets, and they earn between 250 hundred and 750 hundred dollars. A proper distribution of these movies and copyright are still one of the major problems. Nigerian films earned 11 billion USD dollars by the end of 2013, and the industry was worth in 2014 over five billion USD dollars which are in Nigerian naira almost two trillion. This industry contributes about 1.4{6391efe9497c72a003c187913d76e5963587dcd2352ee4ca45c3b54d919ca644} to the Nigeria’s GDP.
