By DERRICK SILIMINA
Youthful Shadreck Mfwana, an upcoming film maker from Solwezi’s Kazomba area, started pursuing film-making as far back as 2007 after completing his Grade 12, though without generating any income then.
“I would hire a camera to learn how to go about film-making, and I also did videos and still photos to raise some income,” Mfwana, now 30, narrates.
In 2016, Mfwana attempted to make a film, courtesy of a certain studio, after having borrowed some money to invest in the venture. The attempt flopped.
However, in January 2018, after learning how to manage his talent, Mfwana enrolled for the business development training programme powered by Kansanshi Mine Limited through Fortune World Investment limited (FWIL) and completed the 12 topic module the same year.
Prior to attending the training, Mfwana had little knowledge of marketing and advertising. After the training, he began to advertise his business through Facebook and grew his customer base.
“I have now registered my business and opened a bank account, as the workshops enlightened me a lot on how to run my film-making enterprise,” he notes.
Mfwana bubbles with confidence, that he now has the capacity to offer various services including; Film-making, script writing, directing for clients, editing for clients, photography and cinematography (camera directing, placement, lighting).
Some of his works so far include screen writing, translation and time coding for his client, a prominent actor on Zambezi Magic, a channel on DSTV.
He recalls that one of the productions on Zambezi Magic, in all worth about K270,000, earned him K5000 per series, giving him a total of K65,000 for 13 episodes.
Mfwana has described the film industry as “very lucrative,” but requires capital investment approximately K30,000 to cater for production costs to pay crew members, logistics, food and clothes for actors among others.
He currently has three pending projects; a feature film of 1 hour 30 minutes in length which has the capacity to earn him K150,000 and a two-part series with 13 episodes each, which could earn him about K400,000.
Other pending outcomes include a 50-per cent profit in some film projects and some TV stations pay commission to air every episode.
“My gratitude goes to the Kanshanshi Mining Plc management team for the training and I encourage them to continue to raise more self-employed persons like myself,” Mfwana says.
