Filmmaker Marts Wants To Change How Nollywood Does Logistics
The company hopes to be Airbnb for film logistics across Africa: A supermarket for everything you need to shoot your films, documentaries and commercials.
(Co-founders of Filmmakers Mart)
In the thick of the pandemic, Chioma Paul-Dike, one of the cofounders of Filmmaker Mart, booked a location for her film. On the day of the shoot, she was denied entry by the house owner because his mother-in-law was around. It sounds ridiculous, but it is a reality many filmmakers face. When she narrated her experience to her friends and future partners, they pondered on a process of securing locations that was more formal and binding. That discussion led to building Filmmaker Mart.
“We thought if there was a platform enabling all this, from contract to payment, you avoid that kind of embarrassment, delay and waste of money,” Eric Kafui Okyerefo, CEO of Filmmaker Mart, tells Inside Nollywood. “So, we decided this is what we’re going to build.”
The company hopes to be Airbnb for film logistics across Africa: A supermarket for everything you need to shoot your films, documentaries and commercials.
“Airbnb helps you to book out people’s spaces for you to live in when you travel,” Okyerefo explains. “What Filmmaker Mart does is we help filmmakers, production companies and creators find services they need for their production. You can just book for those services directly from services providers on the platform.”
Filmmaker Mart launched initially as a location solution after raising about 45,000 USD in April 2021 and instantly set off. Surprisingly, the company’s initial customers weren’t young filmmakers like its founders but established companies like DSTV and Trino studios, who found the ease of getting locations for their production needs delightfully shocking.
These early customers asked for other production services, prompting the young team to scale into different production needs, from sorting cast and crew to welfare and transportation. An additional $130,000 was raised in October 2021 to build the marketplace and scale into neighbouring counties, Kenya, Ghana and South Africa. The aim is to create a pan-African company providing logistical solutions for productions.
Inside Nollywood sat with Mr Okyerefo to discuss their journey and where they want to be.
What inspired your business model?
It all started in film school. My Cofounders [Igho Avuiroevarie and Chioma Paul-Dike] and I met at the Multichoice Talent Factory in 2019. We are a co-founding team of four, but three of us were in the same film school and aligned because we had a similar interest: To build solutions for the industry.
We’re having a friendly conversation—talking about different things in the industry, the challenges and how we can use technology to solve them. If you look at almost every industry right now, technology is solving complex problems, but most of the funding that comes into our industry goes into content creation. Nobody is building the infrastructure for people in the industry, so the first thing that came to mind was finding filming locations.
What is Filmmaker Mart doing to ensure that only reliable providers are available on the marketplace?
We onboard only verified service providers. Every service provider on our marketplace has gone through a thorough verification process to ensure they are legit and can offer what they claim to offer.
A few filmmakers are moving to the logistic business because people see the opportunity. What does filmmaker Mart offer that is different?
With Filmmaker Mart, everything you need, you find in one place. You don’t need to go to five different service providers for other things. Log onto our marketplace; if it’s transport you need, you can get it there. You get everything there, and you get real-time data on how much you spent, accounting, contract signed, everything!
All these other people who exist providing these individual services are not competitors to us; they are people we can collaborate with. Just onboard yourself onto our place, we verify you, and you become a service provider. It’s like a supermarket. You enter a supermarket and find different products by different people; these products are not necessarily competing.
What’s the plan regarding connecting filmmakers and production companies with talents?
Cast and crew are a feature we have not really explored yet because we have a big vision for it, which I can’t disclose now. What we hope to do is make the hiring process easy. As a creative on our marketplace, you can list yourself, put your showreel, experience, CV, what you charge and then people who need you will find you. We are putting you right in the face of these people instead of them going through LinkedIn, social media, or Instagram [to find you].
The same thing for production companies. You can hire your talent right here, pay them and let them sign their contracts, all from our marketplace—making the process seamless.
Filmmaker Mart has worked with heavyweights like DSTV and Trino Pictures. What have you learnt about the Nigerian film industry?
There are a lot of opportunities. Many things need to be fixed, and I have noticed that if you provide anything of value, there are people who will use your service. Once you are giving filmmakers and these production companies value, they will come to you. If they know that they can rely on you to provide all the services at a reasonable rate, get all their paperwork, location, release forms, and all of that, they will come to you.
It will get to a point where many investors want to invest money in the film industry, just like many investors are trying to put money into FinTech today. It is still at an infancy stage; it will continue to grow and many startups will emerge—it will be an exciting time
This interview was first featured in The Industry, a data-driven journal by Inside Nollywood.