Living in Bondage, 1992: The Tape That Started an Industry
Ifeoma sits down with a distributor who sold the original Living in Bondage cassettes in Onitsha and tells the story of how an electronics trader with unsold blank tapes started Nollywood.
The Costume Room: Dressing Fifty Years of Nigerian Characters
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Show notes
The costume room
Costume is the department audiences notice first and credits mention last. Ifeoma visits a Surulere workshop with a designer who has dressed more than eighty Nollywood productions, from early village epics to a recent period drama set in 1970s Lagos.
- Sourcing fabric in Balogun market the week before a shoot
- How a wrapper and a cap tell the audience who is rich and who is wise
- The continuity problem when a film is shot out of order in ten days
- Building a 1970s nightclub wardrobe from family photographs
- What streaming budgets changed and what they did not
Practical answers for anyone trying to dress their first short film.
Transcript
Welcome back to Nollywood Front Row. I am Ifeoma Okeke. Last week we went back to 1992 and the tape that started everything. This week I want to talk about a department that every viewer notices and almost no one credits. Costume. I am sitting in a workshop in Surulere surrounded by bolts of aso oke and racks of agbada with a designer who has dressed more than eighty productions, from the village epics of the early 2000s to a period drama set in a Lagos nightclub in 1974. We are going to talk about how you tell the audience who is rich before anyone speaks, how you keep continuity when a film is shot out of order in ten days, and what streaming money has changed. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts. Front row, please.
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