TaffRock back with New Film; Uses YouTube to try combat piracy in Zim
By Tinashe Sibanda | Nehanda Showbiz |
After the release of the successful film, Dystopia Paruzevha a few years ago, United Kingdom based filmmaker Tafadzwa Mucheri a.k.a TaffRock Media is back once again with his recent rendition called ‘A Fly in the Ointment’ which is currently on YouTube for free public consumption.
In a bid to survive losing out due to the excessive piracy in the industry Mucheri has embarked on trying to recoup the production costs of his new short film, Fly In The Ointment, through monetisation on YouTube.
Whether this will work or not, it will have to be seen as time goes as it has never been done by a Zimbabwean filmmaker before; and to avoid faltering in his attempt Mucheri has made sure that he had copyright over every second of content in the film, a prerequisite for monetisation with YouTube and has fixed all technical issues.
All that remains is for people to watch his film as every time they do so, an advert comes on and he splits with YouTube the revenue generated by the adverts (up to US$4 per 1000 hits).
“The response has been sporadic at the moment although I have had almost 4K views in two weeks. I have run promotions all over Southern Africa via Facebook which recently ended so I just concentrate on Zimbabwe for two weeks and see how that goes,” Mucheri told Nehanda radio in an interview.
He added that a lot of people from elsewhere do not speak Shona and he didn’t put subtitles thus was hoping for a better response from Zimbabwe although also bearing in mind the country’s political and economic situation at the moment might have an impact on numbers.
“I have been using promotional options on Facebook to boost view and costs me £14 a fortnight to reach almost 100k people and have accumulated 6k view from that promotion,” he said.
In describing Mucheri’s recent endeavour, Creative Writer and actor, Masimba Musodza wrote:
“This is the best distribution model for independent Zimbabwean cinema in terms of potential earnings. It costs the audience no more than their time (and broadband usage), and we all know how Zimbabweans feel about paying for cultural products by Zimbabwean artists as this is a driving factor behind rampant piracy.”
Musodza added that a week after A Fly in the Ointment was made available; it had already chalked up over 3000 hits already. There is still a long way to go before even a quarter of the budget is recouped.
Furthermore Mucheri also pioneered a new take on music videos when he produced Cindy Munyavi’s first music video for her hit Nerudo and then Stiletto which were both shot in Zimbabwe.
Mucheri said he however discovered that doing music videos in Zimbabwe was a bit demoralising due to artistes not having the funding to pay for their videos although he really wanted to promote music videos before resolving to just doing pro bono music videos.
He has recently worked with Zimbabwean artiste GoodChild in collaboration with Ex Q as well as with Tricky J, Mugo and Tytan (Mukoko).
