Lagos — Story telling is a form of communication that dates back to the dawn of mankind and today one of the central aspects of successful filmmaking is to develop the quality of script writing, drama production and directing.

Deutsche Welle, Berlin, Germany in collaboration with International Film and Broadcast Academy (IFBA) coached students on drama script development and production. Chinyere Okoye who met some of the resource persons writes

The participants explored the process of making film from the concept to completion, to increase their understanding of the necessities of a good screenplay, and how a screenplay may change over the course of production and post- production. A well-chosen mixture between theoretical background, presentations, discussions, film screenings, practical exercises and team work was noted as an important tool for intensive and effective methods of working with actors in television drama.

The students were coached on story and dramatic structure, the stage of script building, characterisation, dialogue, scene design, directing as a visual story telling and devising a compelling directorial strategy for a scene amongst others.

Dermod Judge

Judge, a member of South African Scriptwriters' Association, is a writer, lecturer and award-winning film maker. He has been accepted as a full founding member of the IFTA - the Irish Film and Television Academy. This entitles him to full voting rights at the annual awards in the writing chapter.

"I have lived in South Africa for 40 years, for the past 10 to 15 years I have been traveling out of the country to teach script writing. I have been making up my leaving in the industry of advertising, photography, designs, film making and writing.

Writing was my first love, and I was involved in theatre in the late seventies in South Africa where we criticise films and meet people. I started writing in the 90's when I realised that it is possible in South Africa to write stories that would be acceptable internationally. So I have been in serious script writing since 1992/1993.

I wrote, acted, directed and told stories, though there was no money in it, I always hanged to get back to story telling and for me to get back fully into story telling was back into film making. The desire to tell stories is what I grew up with and I started exploring stories in South Africa and I found out that there is great similarities between the types of stories, spirit to answers the aspects tale, the people of the other world and how they control their destiny.

All these story telling excites me, the ones that involve stories that can only come out of Africa and I'm forced to come across a lot of talents and my job is to help and tell all these stories.

The challenges are all work. Writing poem is hard. You can put a comma and a day later you might decide to remove it, as a writer I might be sitting around apparently doing nothing but I may be doing the designs, turning out words or dialogue over and over until it is right. A script is not ready for production until it has been thoroughly drafted or has a major re-write, some of my scripts have been in to the seventh or eight re-write before it is produced.

When Judge was asked about his stay in Lagos he said: "I do love Lagos because it has lots of challenges. I find it very fascinating, it is hard and it difficult for me to live in Lagos. Getting around is difficult. My nightmares came through when I got stocked in the bridge, the car broke down and the mechanic comes there and pick the car but in South Africa you can't get your own personal mechanic, it is insane but it works for Lagosians. Again street hawking in Lagos is like one department store in South Africa, everything is available on the road.

With the classes I had with the students for this past two weeks, they would be able to stand out internationally. They are now professionals because they would be able to sit down and write great stories. They have the talents, but need more information, training and experience.

One of his short screenplays - the Death of Brian Boru - was short listed in the Irish Filmbase/RTE Short Film Awards out of 250 entries, and another short screenplay - St Patrick and Ossian - is awaiting the jury results for this year's awards. These are part of a series of humorous takes on Irish history and legend which Dermod has written over the past few years. He hoped to get funding for the series of five films called The Short (Film) History of Ireland, but is submitting them individually to various short film projects in Ireland.

Martin Thou

From an artist family, Thou's mother was an actress and his father was a theatre director, though they had a very unhappy marriage. My parents were always fighting, "so life then was difficult for me so I read a lot of books and building my world of fantasy. I went to University of film technology, were I studied theatre arts. Since nobody was interested in film school, I gained so much knowledge and after my school days, they asked me to stay in the University and teach," he said.

When I was younger, I was a very desperate person, I was not very happy and did not know were to go in life or the meaning of life. In other to solve my problem as a person I studied a lot of philosophy and psychology, I became calmer and at 55 years, I'm a happier person than I was in my twenties and it gives me a lot of security in teaching. I achieved to become a calm person and a better teacher.

According to Thou, who is also from South Africa, the students are perfect and most energetic and charming people. They don't easily give up, they are very laud, and they are open to discussion. Nigeria has a very bad image abroad, but I have come to know that the people are good and they are useable partners. Nigeria is only country that produce writers of international standard like Chinua Achebe.

"Countries or nations have weaknesses. I came from a country that has committed a lot of atrocities or caused the death of six million people, so when I articulate what I observe in other countries, every country has there own fault for Africa is the hypocrisy. No country is perfect but we should try to put things in the right perspective."

Charles Achaye-Odong

Charles Achaye-Odong a project manager of Deutsche Welle DW-AKADEMIE, was born in Uganda, and worked for Uganda Television and studied in the UK, Germany and Japan. He said Nigerians have the ability to get things done under a circumstance which is difficult and still surprisingly get bigger things done. If we talk about the film industry and the speed in which they turn things out is amazing.

Nigerians are passionate people to work with because, "my human interest is the human being and Nigerians are wonderful people with good stories. I'm a person who loves to hear from what story or which story you are telling. Nigerians are very resourceful", Achaye-Odong said.

"The Nigerian professionals face challenges of getting things done under foreign types of circumstances and the idea is to succeed in spite of whatever problems we could have. Another challenge is that we met wonderful people over a short period of time. The relationships become very intense but we must let go because we have to move on to another project in another country," he said.

With the knowledge from Deutsche Welle, "I think under the circumstances the professionals worked, if they get necessary support, their scripts are ready for the screen with international standard. The second process is getting the necessary funding and getting themes behind their work in order to get the scripts development ready," he said.

I charge the professionals to take their job seriously, the period I have stayed with the students have shown that they are serious. They have seen the importance of screen play in live production and how to write script which can tell the story in a visual way rather than conveying them by words," Achaye-Odong said.