He said the motion capture studio will help reduce the amount of time it takes to create animations.
“It is a boost that reduces the time for animating and that will be beneficial for filmmakers,” Shyaka said. “If we get more animation, it will make us produce more films in short time to become more productive than when we were supposed to use the hand animation.”
Sizing up Rwanda’s media industry
The media industry in Rwanda is small at the present time, according to Lindsay. Skills, standardization and infrastructure for production is still limited. But he said because Rwanda already has the fiber infrastructure in place, the country is a good investment opportunity.
More television stations, NGOs and online enterprises need services and workers and there are not many eligible people who can fulfill these services. The academy’s first 1,000 students would be absorbed into the local economy, he said.
The media production market has substantial growth opportunities as well as businesses that have not yet been explored. And over the next two decades, media production for web and e-learning will overshadow TV and film revenues worldwide.
“To take advantage of this opportunity, Rwanda would need to start now,” Lindsay noted. “They have the right infrastructure to make this happen. The highway is there, we just need to build the cards.”
Following the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Rwandan filmmaker Eric Kabera started his own production company called Link Media Production. He also founded the Rwanda Cinema Center in 2001, which received accreditation in 2004 as well as the Rwandan Film Festival in 2005.
The center eventually grew to become the Kwetu Film Institute, the first full-fledged film school in Rwanda.
Kabera said the school’s media design program trains students on the techniques of the industry. Students have been inspired to start their own film production companies, Kabera said.
“Rwanda is very well poised to benefit from that because we have actually been producing a feature film every year for the last 10 years and that has given us a platform where young men and women can learn quickly,” he said.
Although there are no formal statistics on Rwandan film industry, also known as “Hillywood,” Kabera said there are about 20 production houses and a feature film on Rwanda every year on an international scale.
There are also five to 15 short films and documentaries every year out of Rwanda. The Kwetu Institute produces seven to 10 short films each year, compared to an average of five each year.
He commended ADMA’s work and said he hopes to collaborate more with the academy in the future.
“I think they’re doing a great job and we’re complementing each other because the terrain is still very unexploited and we don’t have much,” he said. “We don’t have many schools, many initiatives similar to this.”
The academy hopes to have 500 students this year and to have the program become a certificate program by the end of the year. The academy aims to keep up with the increasingly changing landscape of technology in the future.
“As the proliferation of the Internet continues to expand, as we have more and more broadcasters, 10 years from now, 20 years from now, we’re really playing in a different world,” Lindsay said.
