The Hope Factory helps women filmmakers to achieve their dream
Published by www.mediaupdate.co.za on 25 August, 2015
Lights, camera and action. Three words that bring joy to the lives of three inspiring Johannesburg female filmmakers. While many people are looking for the glamorous life that comes with being in front of the camera, these three are happy to tell the stories behind the scenes.
Brainbow Productions is unlike any other television production company. Mukundi Lambani, Kutlwano Makgalemele and Chule Gobodo, the owners of the business, have decided to take a different approach and tell stories that matter on a different platform, online.
“We are not trying to chase what other people are doing. Thanks to The Hope Factory, we've been able to get the business aligned to our dream,” says Lambani.
Their journey together started in school. Makgalemele was studying cinematology. She's worked on prominent TV shows such as Strictly Come Dancing and also travelled to China where she worked on a feature film. Besides running a company with her friends, she also teaches cinematology part time.
Chule Gobodo on the other hand learned the craft of writing and directing. She also has a diploma in business studies and marketing – skills she's using to help the business to flourish. A cinematology student as well, Lambani added editing to her skills as well. She travelled to South Korea to teach English and when she returned to South Africa she didn't come back empty-handed. She bought the rights to produce The 48 Hour Film Project in South Africa - a programme that requires film makers to make a movie - write, shoot, edit and score it - in 48 hours.
Their love for film making brought these three creatives together. To help them on their entrepreneurial journey, they joined The Hope Factory's programme to improve their business skills. “We wanted to take the business seriously and we want to be a sustainable business in the film industry. The mentorship programme has helped us define who we are in this industry and our mentor helped us to find our unique selling points,” says Lambani.
They have identified various opportunities and one of them is to tell meaningful stories online. Watching television series or movies online has fast become the norm, especially for young people. Lambani says when they started in the business, there was no space for short films online but this has now changed. There's a demand for short, punchy film content for the online space.
Their goal is to build the business as the number one distributor of short film content for online platforms and be the source of what Lambani describes as ‘conscious' content. “In everything we do or are, there's consciousness happening and this needs to resonate in the things we watch.” Furthermore, they want to also create a place for other film makers to be able to come to them to tell their store online.
They have found a gap in the market to produce online film content. “We found that there aren't enough producers for these platforms. The reason we've taken this new direction is to create more platforms where stories can be told,” she says.
The rewards of owning a business are endless for those who don't give up. “The advantage of doing this every day is you know you're working towards a dream and vision that's bigger than yourself. That makes working hard worthwhile and it's also great to love what you're doing,” Lambani concludes.
