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Africa’s new horizons

Posted By Clive Whittingham On 14-12-2012 @ 11:43 am In Features | Comments Disabled

The roll-out of DTT is increasing opportunities for African producers, but they are being forced to diversify their output and cope with a changing rights position. Clive Whittingham reports.

Tales From the Bush Larder

Tales From the Bush Larder

As technology, regulation and production quality improves, perhaps the greatest challenge facing the African television industry is overcoming the stereotypical image of its content.

The long-held view that Africa is somewhere to export your shows to but never to take programmes from is changing. Factual channel History recently commissioned Miracle Rising: South Africa, a two-hour documentary about apartheid from South African indie Combined Artists.

However, preconceptions still abound. Mandy Roger, head of sales, acquisitions and business development at South African broadcaster MNet, says: “When the agencies have watched the screeners of the films and the series we have they’re all surprised how good the quality is and that it matches up to the quality of some of the US content.

“The challenge is to get the message out there and get people to meet me and take a look at it. If we just send something out, people see ‘South Africa’ and they just have an African stereotype in their minds that puts them off, which is unfortunate.”

Nevertheless, MNet will triple its commissioning budget in the next financial year to further improve the quality and quantity of its content.

One stereotype the industry is keen to maintain, however, is the reputation for quality wildlife filmmaking. With all manner of exotic species to hand it’s not surprising that an entire industry has grown up to film it.

Chris Fletcher, director of sales and programming at wildlife prodco Earth Touch, based in the South African town of Umhlanga, says the quality of the product from these local operations remains unrivalled. “They tend to be small outfits – one or two people, husband and wife – but they know the terrain well,” he says. “They produce fantastic films on very low budgets because they’re there all the time, which means they get the shots.

“The one area where perhaps they are lacking is storytelling, so they come to us with the rough cuts and we help them complete it and develop the storyline.”

Earth Touch targets its completed projects at international broadcasters like Nat Geo Wild, Animal Planet and Smithsonian Networks as the money available from local broadcasters means, according to Fletcher, “it’s not worth doing.”

But as traditional broadcasters of blue-chip wildlife programming, like National Geographic, increasingly look for character-led, returnable series, the African production community has to diversify. Earth Touch is yet to find a taker for its Ranger Academy competition series but is trying again with a show about a Durban-based Englishman who residents call out when their homes are invaded by deadly snakes, and a series called Swamp Truckers (working title) about delivery drivers who work across the bush.

Dave Keet, general manager at marine-filming specialist Aquavision, agrees. “Reality television has had a seriously detrimental effect on blue-chip wildlife filmmaking. Broadcasters are looking more and more along reality lines and making it a combination of the two,” he says.

Clive Morris

Clive Morris

“The result of that is companies are having to look to other genres to keep expanding. Certainly, blue-chip wildlife content is a shrinking market rather than a growing one. We’re finding growing demand for character-led programming. We are moving into it but, obviously, as an African country, character-led programming becomes quite difficult, especially for the US market, which is insistent on US characters. We are having to Americanise our programming to fit that market.”

To that end, Clive Morris Productions (CMP), previously better known for programmes like Crimes Uncovered for MNet and SABC2’s long-running conservation show 50|50, is branching out into scripted reality with Clifton Shores. “Instead of buying formats, as we tend to do with the likes of MasterChef and Idol, creating our own content and getting the rest of the world to start buying our formats is where we need to be,” says CEO Morris.

“Clifton Shores could be an ice-breaker as far as that’s concerned. The problem is that in South Africa the broadcaster would have to make a financial leap of faith to work on an untested format. With Idol and MasterChef you know it’s worked and you paint by numbers. To take a format from scratch and put it on air is a risk.”

Clifton Shores, in which four American girls come to work for a Cape Town businessman, is also unusual in that it was funded by the producers, who have consequently retained all rights. This goes against the norm in South African production, where shows are usually commissioned and wholly owned by the broadcasters. An international deal has already been struck with the US-based TV Guide Network, where the show will air as The Shores.

Zuku, a pay-TV platform in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, is trying to increase the amount of locally produced content on its channels and is sharing the distribution rights with producers. It recently commissioned cooking and travel series Tales From the Bush Larder from Kenyan prodco Quite Bright Films.

Hannelie Bekker, MD of programming at Zuku parent Wananchi Broadcasting, says: “We’ve retained the distribution rights to Bush Larder in Africa but, obviously, we are sharing income with Quite Bright. Internationally, we have placed it with Off the Fence and Quite Bright shares the income.

“In most cases, we try to structure the agreement in such a way that our interests are aligned with those of the production house. If there are going to be back-end sales, everybody has to benefit because that way the production house is incentivised, we are incentivised and it’s win/win.”

Morris adds that while he would love to own more rights, committing the money to make the production of good enough quality and then relying on selling it yourself can be risky. “Because the businessman involved in Clifton Shores financed it, he has been able to hold on to the rights and we’ve been able to sell it on. It’s been a wonderful and terrible experience,” he jokes. “Obviously, there is a huge risk involved in selling it. It was very scary. Now it’s sold internationally, I’m hoping it will sell around the world and we will make some money back. There’s the pendulum – if you’re commissioned you know what you’re going to get, but if you shop it around there is more unknown but the rewards are better if you can sell it. It’s not that practical.”

Duncan Irvine

Duncan Irvine

Keet, at Aquavision, says that while he looks to take second-window rights to the company’s productions, the international networks it deals with are looking to extend the duration of their licences. “That becomes difficult for us because it extends the timeframe for us to get a return,” he says.

That will also start to affect Earth Touch, which relies heavily on second-window sales to terrestrials like France 5, NHK in Japan, ABC in Australia and others. “With the pan-regional channels, they have an exclusivity period for cable and satellite but then the rights come back to us for terrestrial. That’s crucial to our business model,” says Fletcher.

The big move in Africa at the moment is the roll-out of DTT, which is bringing scores of new channels and players into the market, including big broadcasters like Scandinavia’s Modern Times Group. As far as bringing in more money is concerned, Morris wonders whether this will simply see “the same pie split into smaller pieces,” but Duncan Irvine, CEO of South African prodco Rapid Blue, is more optimistic.

Rapid Blue produces South African versions of Got Talent, Strictly Come Dancing and So You Think You Can Dance. “I’d say the mood is cautiously optimistic,” Irvine says. “All the broadcasters are spending more money than the year before. For a lot of the international channels coming into South Africa, because they’re satellite channels they just don’t have the same budgets the terrestrials do, so having interesting kinds of funding models has helped us to make programmes for them.”

These funding models include sponsorship and product placement. “It means that in some cases they can get a show. When they’ve looked at it in the past it’s been hard to make it work in terms of their budgets,” Irvine says. “Production values in Nigeria, where we also produce, are definitely lower than the production values in South Africa, and part of the problem is technology. DTT is coming in and that should be a game-changer.”

But as shown by the continuing success of Nollywood films, production standards are often less important than storylines when it comes to African audiences.

DTT certainly seems to be the key to turning the current steady progress into an explosion. Once the technology catches up, the potential in this market is astounding. But there’s a long way to go before it can be realised.


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