EDITORIAL: If your film is not online you are missing out!
To say you are missing out if your film is not online is not an overstatement especially in this digital age.
When a film producer produces a film he or she expects that the film reaches a wider audience and touches lives. Such a film is expected to travel to places that even the producer cannot get to. In the light of this, when a gospel film producer, actor or director receives calls/messages from outside his state or country of testimony on how a particular film blessed or touched their lives, the producer, actor or director gets excited and feels encouraged to do more.
However, if such a film which is supposed to bless lives across the globe is circulated only within a small geographical space, it might not achieve its purpose. Many gospel films produced in Nigeria, unlike those days are films loaded with great messages, good story line, nice acting, superb picture quality, attractive set and costumes among others.
Today’s gospel films are meeting with world standards in terms of quality and good storyline. Gospel films are even meeting up with cinema standard and breaking barriers into cinemas. It will be a great disaster if such good messages don’t go beyond a circle. If a movie is dubbed in disc, every gospel filmmaker knows that there are no real and enough marketers for gospel films, not even distributors across the nation. Marketers who have large distribution chain across the nation are not ready to market gospel films not to talk of distributing it. Only few of the distributors of gospel films in the country are faithful to producers.
We were shocked when we discovered that more than thirteen thousand (13,000) people had already viewed KSO’s latest movie, Atohunrinwa (The non- Indigene) online just a week after it was uploaded. Thirteen thousand (13,000) copies of disc wouldn’t have sold even within the space of six months.
Many times, when Gospel Film News publishes a news story about a film, we get lots of messages and mails from different people asking if the films are online and how they can download the film. We get discouraged many times and just reply that it will soon be online.
The truth of the matter is that the kind of audience we have now is mobile audience. People who want to see a film on the go. People who want to have the latest movies on their phones in their pockets, people who want to be on transit and enjoy a movie.
A Nollywood director last week asked the publisher of Gospel Film News, Oluwafemi Dosu if there was any Online TV that shows gospel films. He was able to mention an existing one and an upcoming one. Against the backdrop that there are many online TVs platforms that shows secular films. It means our audience wants our films to be online for easy accessibility. Imagine someone in Kano who wants to see a particular film produced in Lagos and there is no distributor of gospel film in Kano. Such appetite would be frustrated, but if such film is online, the man in Kano just needs to go on YouTube or any site to watch or download the movie.
Our conclusion on this note is that, all gospel films produced should be made available online and production outfit or ministries as the case may be should open a YouTube channel and upload their films.
Remember, we live in a digital world and our audience is mobile.
