How YouTubing and Skit making have revolutionalised Nollywood and Filmmaking

By O’star Eze

YouTube and Skits revolutionalised film making in no small way. There is no gainsaying this fact. What, with the way skit making is churning out ‘over night’ screen celebrities, movie makers and actors alike have had to make the necessary adjustments to make the most of these innovations in the show business lest their career goes moribund.

Thanks to YouTube and the wide acceptance cum patronage of skits and reels and suchlike, you find some Nollywood acts whose careers were in comatose reviving them by lobbying to feature on short comedy skits.

One super star who was made by skit making and are presently veering into Nollywood that come to mind are Mr Macaroni, who has, since his breakthrough via skit making, featured on several cinema movies.

It is noteworthy that before the internet and the resultant streaming platforms it provided, many people who were exceptional story tellers through video found it a Herculean task to break into the movie industry.

But with the advent of the internet and YouTube, film makers now have bigger opportunities. They no longer need to go through that bottleneck of Film Marketers’ approval to get their art to the audience. It is now easier to break into the movie industry as a grey horn and get loyal audience. Those days when highly talented filmmakers were subsumed by the bureaucracy of the movie industry are gone. Everyone now has access to the end consumers of movies. YouTube has a user base of about a billion hours of viewing every day. There is therefore now no limit to how many persons that can view your films and if you are good at your craft, the consumers will say so.

YouTube and Skit making have also made it possible to get direct feedback from the audience. This was not the case before the advent of the internet. Youtube has built-in analysis tools and the comments section allows filmmakers an opportunity to receive direct feedback from the audience who watch their films. This can be extremely valuable to any filmmaker that wants to make headway in the industry. Feedback, whether positive or negative, will give a filmmaker good insight into the specific aspects of their films that the audience likes or wishes to be improved.

YouTubing, particularly, makes it easier for the filmmaker to grow his audience. Not everyone can afford to go to the cinema. But almost everybody has access to YouTube and with the record 1 billion hours of views on YouTube daily, a film maker is rest assured that once he is making quality content, he will grow his desired scope of audience and even exceed his expectations.

YouTube and Skit Making have also made it easier to build awareness of new films. Before now, it was only through newspaper publications and word of mouth that film makers could create awareness of their productions and it used to take a longer time to spread word about new movies across geographical locations. But with YouTube and skit making, it takes less budget to create awareness and the reach of the internet is boundless. Take for instance this movie by Dr Sid, The Order of Things. Inside Nollywood has added to the buzz Dr Sid is building around the movie by creating a Twitter Spaces recently.

Dr Sid also mentioned the animation skit he created at the beginning of his movie which the audience responded positively to when it was televised at the cinema. This goes to show that indeed, with short skits and YouTube, the filmmaking business has been revolutionalised in no small way.

YouTube made it easier for filmmakers to have access to groups where they can interact directly with their fans. This was not possible before. A filmmaker can share their content to their fans found on these social media groups and pages where th…