Nana Yaw Yeboah

I love story-telling. This is the essence of my attraction to filmmaking. But filmmaking for me is story-telling taken to another level with all kinds of possibilities for embellishment, texturing and layering. In film, one collects raw shots, which has a primitive or primary performance. Then in the editing room, one takes the shots to construct the advanced or secondary level of performance but as you edit you create different escalating degrees of performance and when you add sound it escalates further. In film, the performance is built on a process called montage; the audio-visual construction of the image. And when those opportunities are fully explored, cinematic story-telling does NOT, have to be traditional narrative; an obvious beginning, middle and end. Of course all stories have a beginning, middle and end because they start and end at a point. But stories don’t always have to follow the traditional three-act structure, where things are set up in the beginning, complicated in the middle and resolved at the end. I believe cinematic story telling must have original stories and original sequential events that are organic to the story. I love that film is not only entertainment, but could also be about one’s awareness of one’s own existence. Good films make me question who I am and teach me much about contradictions within oneself and about social forces.

I was attracted to film some years ago, and within this time I had made great efforts to learn film making the best way I can. Over the years, I have been very fortunate to have had some quality training workshops that have greatly improved by understanding of film making. And even though I think I still have a lot more to learn, I also do think I can share some useful ideas with my fellow film makers and engage in a discourse that will ultimately help us make better films.  I believe it is important that as young film makers we do not follow in the same path as those before us that has in my view contributed significantly to the current sad state of the movie industry on the continent of Africa.

We have to understand the power of sharing, collaborating and learning from each other.  Filmmaking is not an Olympic competition where one person must finish first and another second.  We can all hold hands and together cross the finish line.