Enhancing Nigeria’s Response to HIV and Aids (ENR) is a new Pan-Nigerian, DfID-funded project which will focus on lowering the prevalence of HIV in the country.
An aspect of this, which the BBC World Service Trust (BBC WST) is a part of, is to help capacity building at national and state TV stations. This involves creating a TV training team which will then go out and provide training at local stations, including training on HIV reporting and co-producing with the station for several weeks.
Ambika Samarthya, an international trainer based in Abuja reports on the first stages of the three year project.
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TV programmes in Nigeria can generally be quite dull. This is primarily due to a lack of creativity in approach, which is something I wanted to focus on during my training and really push Nigerian TV trainers to think outside of the box.
Nasiru and Devaan (the two Nigerian producers who are involved in the ENR project) embraced this concept hands on. As we planned our HIV content TV programmes, Nasiru came up with the idea of a short music-based dramatisation of a married man who has multiple partners. This idea is unheard of in the Nigerian TV landscape, even though music videos and Nigerian music are widely popular. Nasiru’s shot list (list of visual images) consisted of a man at a bar, hotel, office, and at home with his wife.
When it came to filming, I suggested to Nasiru and the actors that we would go into a bar pretending I was a tourist and shooting it like a home video. They looked at me with blank faces. I realised then that the idea of “guerrilla shooting” isn’t a regular part of Nigerian filmmaking. Using a handheld or a one-person crew to do off the cuff shooting, capturing busy streets and hangouts, or filming in a bar or hotel without permission is just not done. But it’s (almost) exactly what we did – and it worked.
When we got to the hotel, Nasiru immediately went inside to ask the manager for permission. Of course the manager wasn’t around and Nasiru was disappointed. As a compromise I suggested we just shoot the hotel sign from outside and show us entering the gates. It worked.
But some other things weren’t as straightforward.
The format that Devaan had developed was a testimonial, which is simple enough, but to make it visually exciting and different she scripted it out so the person would be talking while driving in their car. We were well prepared: I had a shoulder brace to steady the camera while she was in the passenger seat, we checked the audio so it was clear, and the actor had memorized the script.
But as we started driving three things happened that I had not at all expected.
Filming in the car
Firstly, all the street lights went out. There was a power shortage and cut (as there often is in Nigeria, a country which has a significant power supply problem) and it was evening so it was too dark outside. We had to look for a street with busy, well-lit businesses but it wasn’t easy to find.
Secondly, because the power had gone out, there was a traffic jam in the middle of the street. We sat waiting, and waiting, and waiting in a criss-cross of dozens of cars around an intersection. There was no traffic warden. An exasperated man finally came out of his car to try and direct traffic.
Last of all, and possibly the one I had considered least, was fuel. We were using Devaan’s car for the shoot and I noticed as we drove around that she had become anxious. Apparently there was a fuel scarcity in Nigeria and because of upcoming gas price hikes, petrol stations were hoarding fuel making it both difficult to obtain fuel and also to afford it.
This was not working. We stopped the shoot and decided to film the scene right before dusk the next day so there would be abundant light and we could grab everything we needed with a few loops on the same street. And it worked.
Although we will have to brace ourselves in occasionally hitting a wall, I believe we will continue to think outside of the box and keep pushing other producers in Nigeria to do the same.
