Filmmaking, established by the Lumiere Brothers to narrate events recorded on the mechanisms developed by various inventors of cameras, has taken a major rise in development in most developing countries across Europe, America, and some African countries.
In Ghana, however, filmmaking has remained stagnant over the last couple of decades, even with the rise in technology and education improvements in the country.
Most people in Ghana just view filmmaking as a medium to watch a few notable stars display their shenanigans and laugh at them without taking the craft itself into consideration.
This problem of focusing on just comedy-driven actors for movies has caused a massive number of people to lose the reverence they have for our filmmaking as a source of art, and this has some pernicious effects on the craft for future filmmakers.
Filmmaking has some basic fundamental elements that filmmakers around the world develop to make the scenes and the motion pictures pleasing to the eyes. In Hollywood movies, cinematographers and directors mostly share their artistic vision by carefully applying various building blocks of shots and camera movement that transcend the normal still-motion shots that Ghanaian filmmakers mostly employ to shoot scenes.
The use of expensive CGI effects to explore fictional worlds in foreign movies is spell-bounding and gives the audience the thrill of watching over and over again.
The editors of the movies have various techniques for blending various types of scenes and mixing them with sounds to create a realistic feel for events.
Screenplays in most developed movie-making countries are developed over a period of years, and post-production work on projects sometimes takes years.
This perfect assembly of crew for pre-production, production, and post-production is crucial to producers and studios, as any flop will lower the standards they have placed upon themselves. Ghanaian filmmakers mostly put any material out there with no substance and very little regard for the elements of film.
Colour grading is not even thought of; scripts are just improvisations by actors, which mostly do not add depth to the screenplay. Edited scenes are fitted to drag-and-drop takes for particular scenes, and sound editing and mixing are just disregarded. The omissions of these technicalities of filmmaking make watching a Ghanaian movie feel like an indecision to end one’s life.
Overall, watching a Ghanaian movie leaves you wondering what steps and directions movie makers want to take. The likes of Shirley Frimpong-Manso and Leila Djansi have made some clever movies over the years, but their efforts have been rendered futile because of the abysmal brand the industry has, which has made the Ghanaian population lose interest in going in a rush for such movies.
Films are representations of life, and audiences, after watching, should feel themselves part of the world and relate to the mood of events. Filmmakers in Ghana should sit up and create masterpieces that seek to bring respect to the art because successful filmmakers across the globe are respected at work because of their contributions to the development of craft.
Filmmaking, which doesn’t seem to generate income in our country, generates billions for a certain government and creates employment for thousands of citizens per production.
Filmmakers should start developing movies to depict the craft so as to turn our industry into a respectable and powerful house.
Source: Theodora Baidoo Boatemaa
