Producing Cheaply, Selling Quickly: the Un-Hollywood Production Paradigm of Nollywood Video Films
Babson Ajibade, Ben Williams

Abstract
In April 2007 Nigeria‟s Bob TV invited Hollywood‟s Kisha Imani Cameron as resource person for its Skill Factory Workshop on Film Producing. No sooner had the first session begun that she declared: “There is so much to learn here”. Global (and therefore western) techniques of film production were completely incompatible with – and in some ways, even thwarted by – the local popular video methodologies. Thus, having to learn anew film techniques previously taken for granted as „global‟ and „given‟, a western „trainer‟ became a „trainee‟ in the visual cultural space of Nigeria‟s Nollywood. Exploring an instance in 2007 where Hollywood‟s Cameron confronted the production paradigm of Nigerian video films at Abuja, and using empirical understandings of Nigeria‟s film industry, this paper interrogates how the visual cultural production paradigm of Nollywood departs from Western notions typified by Hollywood. In this paper, we interrogate how the visual culture of the popular videos departs from Western notions economically and paradigmatically.

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