entertainment & lifestyle · film industry
ExploringFilm Industry
Films get made here. What is missing is the machinery around the work — the paperwork, the budget arithmetic and the route to an audience that does not depend on somebody else's recommendation algorithm.
Photo: Mariia Stepanova on Unsplash
The opportunity
African film is booming on streaming platforms, yet most crews still plan, budget and distribute with paper and phone calls.
-
01
Production planning
Shoot schedules, budgets and call sheets built for small crews and tight money.
-
02
Local distribution
Ways to get a finished film in front of paying audiences at home, not only at festivals.
-
03
Talent directories
A place where actors, crew and kit hire in each city can be found and booked.
On our roadmap
We have not started building here yet, but it is on our list and we will take it on. If you are working on this, or need it, get in touch.
What we'd build
Four ideas, in the order we would test them. None are built.
-
01
A production kit that fits a phone
Call sheets, shot lists, locations and contacts in something a small crew can actually update between setups — offline where the set has no signal, which is most of the time.
-
02
Budgets that survive contact with a shoot
The spreadsheet every small production rebuilds from scratch, tracking what was costed against what was actually spent, and what that means for the next one.
-
03
Getting the film seen
One honest page per title — where it is screening, what it costs, who is in it — instead of a trailer buried in a feed that changes tomorrow.
-
04
Local content in the catalogue
A browsable record of Zambian films and the people who made them, so an audience has somewhere to start and a filmmaker has somewhere to be found.
Where it stands
Exploring
Desk research and early conversations. Nothing is built, and this is the category where the first useful step is almost certainly not software — it is finding out which part of the process actually costs a crew the most time.
A film industry without funding or distribution does not have a software problem. If the answer turns out to be money, we will say that rather than build a tool for it.