HARARE – Locally produced feature film, LOBOLA, has successfully reached over 70000 DVD sales at the close of a second month in direct public sales, thereby establishing the film as one of the top selling motion pictures in the country.
According to the film makers Ivory Pictures the sales figures position the youthful filmmakers as an unrivalled force to reckon with in the Zimbabwean film industry. “We are pushing almost a thousand copies a day, and right now we have sold slightly above 70000 copies in two months,” the group said.
Ivory Pictures said it has to switch strategy to direct public sales and this has seen their branded buses travel to several towns and cities around the country including Bulawayo, Harare, Gweru, Chegutu, Kwekwe, Murehwa, Chitungwiza, Chinhoyi, Bindura, and more.
Producer Rufaro Kaseke said “we had to reposition ourselves and change some arrangements with some leading retailers. This we did in favour of direct public sales as a counter measure to improve our sales.”
Kaseke, one of the finest cinematographers in the country, partnered together with actor and Big Brother Africa 3 & 5 finalist, Munya Chidzonga and Joe Njagu, who wrote and produced the movie Bitter Pill, to form Ivory Pictures.
Commenting on a recent press report in a local daily that dismissed LOBOLA as a “flop” because of a technical challenge caused by poor sound-scoring, Kaseke said that it was an admissible challenge.
“The writer of that article took a very serious note and we admit that the sound mix was not perfect. Events that led to our oversight can be understandable taking into cognizance the fact that we overlooked the area of sound-scoring as we were working on a shoe-string budget.”
The dreadlocked film producer said that Ivory Pictures had paid their own tuition fees in the making of LOBOLA, but now they know the basic fundamentals in sound-scoring as far as their films are concerned.
“The first sound specialists that we contracted did a shoddy job because they had difficulties balancing the sound and the dialogue. There are very few experienced professionals who do sound-scoring in the country, in a nutshell I would say we had not identified the good sound-scoring people for film in Zimbabwe.” he said.
“We have taken time to calculate our judgments and have reached an agreement with ourselves that in our forthcoming production we will commit enough resources and attention to sourcing the best sound scorers. We have discussed this widely with our technical team as well as our next sound technicians.”
Kaseke said, “Now in our next production we are working extremely hard to improve our sound.” Different sound-scoring options have been considered from a professional sound scoring perspective and we are working with local and international sound producers to find ways to improve our sound-scoring.
