Ty Rawls: Discovering The Africa In Nigerian Movies

Ty Rawls

Most of us never come in contact with the folks who edit Nigerian and African movies. Yes, the Editor. Who, did you say? Well, in some circles, it is believed that the editor is actually the one who makes the movie you see. He cuts together the many bits and pieces of video the director shoots. He can easily make the actor look better than he did delivering a line on the production set…or just make him look terrible. It simply boils down to the shots he selects in the editing room.

Ty Rawls is one of the few foreigners ever to have had the experience of editing a Nigerian movie – Mildred Okwo’s yet to be released 30 Days.

Www.naijarules.com: Hey Ty, tell us about your professional life.

Ty Rawls: I guess you could say my entire life, I have been in love with film and entertainment, which includes comic books, short stories, whatever.  I’ve just been in love with the whole idea of telling stories.  In particular for me, heroes kind of drove me.  The idea of Superman, Spiderman, Batman, you know… These ideas at a young age really sparked me sort of to explore what super-heroism was.  So at a young age, I started to think about it and that sort of thought process led me to writing about the ideas I had, which eventually led to actually creating my own comic books and getting into comics.

So that was kind of a long process cos I started buying comics when I was 12-13 years old and started drawing comics at the same time and writing stories at the same time.  But it wasn’t until I was in my mid 20s that I actually produced a book – a series – and got it distributed and put on the market.

Www.naijarules.com:        What’s the book called?

Ty Rawls: Smoke.  Smoke was the title of my book.

Www.naijarules.com:        What kind of book was it?

Ty Rawls: It’s a comic book.  It’s about a superhero which I created, totally fictional.  He’s a black superhero from Detroit.  I kind of … At the time (it was the late 90s), there was a sort of explosion of black superheroes.  I think Blade had just come out the year before.  Matrix episode one was the big movie and people hadn’t really committed to the idea of these black heroes as being profitable, especially on the comic market.  I think I kind of sensed that that was changing, especially with Blade, so… And just as a kid, I really wanted to create a black superhero that kind of has this superman dignity about him, coming from America.  I wanted a hero that had this sort of honor, dignity and respect that I thought were sort of lacking in the other black heroes that had been written in the past.

That kind of took me to the next stage of writing scripts and then I met up with some directors out east.  So, I created my comic book in Detroit.  When it took off and went worldwide, I moved out East to see what I could do there.

Www.naijarules.com:       Did you illustrate Smoke yourself?

Ty Rawls: Yeah, I illustrated the book, I wrote it, I coloured it.  I did everything.

Www.naijarules.com:        Is it still in the market now?

Ty Rawls: It’s off the market now, but you can… It’s only a 7-book series, and then I pressed it into a graphic novel.  I think the last books were sold in 2003-2004 so I haven’t reprinted anything since then.

Www.naijarules.com:        So, how did the storyteller, the illustrator, become the editor?

Ty Rawls: Well, basically, I was involved with a film in Boston which was a martial arts thriller, an action adventure we shot very low budget.  I was a minimal part of the film in terms of credit, but I was doing a lot of things to actually support the film, from just running around on set to all the press materials and even negotiating the deals for the film in the end.  That led me to writing scripts.  As I was working with the director and showing up on set and we became really good friends and he had read my book, so he kind of explained to me that you could do live action.  What I was into at that point was thinking about having my book animated.  He sort of pushed me along into the future (I think I would have eventually gotten there) was live action.  I sort of saw that as 10 years down the line after I’d accomplished what I wanted to accomplish in animation.
And I changed my mind to wanna do life action and started script writing and realized I was pretty good at it and started banging out scripts.  Before you knew it, I had 3 or 4 and we had a couple of different companies/producers/directors looking at them and I felt confident enough to move out of L.A.  So, that was two and a half years ago.  I moved out here and was lucky enough to get a job in post-production at a post house on La Cienega right in Hollywood and met lots of people you know, in that job, sharpened my skills, got my connections.  Through a coincidence, I got a phone call from Mildred.  She’d bumped into one of my clients or something like that.  Next thing you know, we had a meeting at a restaurant.  She wanted me to edit her film –

Www.naijarules.com:         And this is how you got into 30 Days…

Ty Rawls: She showed me the script.  I took the script home.  When I read it, she gave me a kind of when she’d like to have it done, and how she thought she’d like it to look and to feel.  I think when we really knew that we had something was when the idea of Charlie’s Angels came up.  It was kind of funny because I guess the previous editor that she was looking at, when she had a meeting with him, she’d brought up Charlie’s Angels to kind of see what his reaction to that would be.  I guess his reaction was that was great, way to go and Charlie’s Angels was a good movie and like if we could do that with 30 Days, it’d be a great film and I think she just walked out right there.  When she asked me about Charlie’s Angels, I was like no, this isn’t Charlie’s Angels.  You don’t have Charlie’s Angels here.  You have a serious movie here.  This is real acting.  There’s no wires.  The fight scenes were incredibly fun to do on my end because they were all kind of old school techniques of how to shoot fight scenes.  And they were women.  So, for the first time I think there would have been some Nollywood film worth seeing, you know, women doing things that we typically see men do and I think that’s great.  I’m glad to be involved.

Www.naijarules.com:        When you met Mildred for the first time and she gave you a script, was that the first time you heard about the whole idea of Nollywood and home video being made in Nigeria?

Ty Rawls: Yeah, I knew there was a Nigerian film market just like any other market, but I hadn’t really focused on it, so my awareness of what they were doing was kind of slight.  I knew that they had a filmmaking class (as in culture) growing there, but I didn’t really invest too much time in it until I met Mildred.  And then after seeing Nollywood films and realizing that Nigerians are so wrapped up in the stories, they really love these characters, I find myself watching this Nollywood films and I finish ‘em.  And a big reason why is because they’re character based movies.  There’s not a lot of money to kind of spend time trying –

Www.naijarules.com:       (Cutting in) Spend on special effects and stuff…

Ty Rawls: Yeah, you can’t blow stuff up and have car chases or these other things, so we’re focused on what’s happening with the character, which almost in a way gives you a Quentin Tarantino feel because its this realism that’s coming out.  Its real.  You’re sitting down with two characters talking for ten minutes in a row, that’s real.  See, you get kind of wrapped up in it and I think that it’s a great… you know, I learned a lot from that as well, because you probably couldn’t have told me that that was possible.  I’d be like, no, no one’s gonna watch that.

Www.naijarules.com:         I understand you picked up a few titles to further research into the emerging industry.

Ty Rawls: Yeah.  Exactly.  And I could tell from the raw footage the first time I saw Mildred’s raw footage… it was actually CBA (Chet Anekwe) doing his work – can’t remember the other actor’s name, but it was Chet and the guy who plays the Chief of Police in the movie –

Www.naijarules.com:        Segun Arinze

Ty Rawls: There you go.  Segun.  Amazing actor.  Love the guy.  Incredible, yeah.  Great face, great voice, great everything.

Www.naijarules.com:         He has a very expressive face.

Ty Rawls: Yeah, incredible.  So, that was the first footage I saw.  It was him and Kene – that’s the two names of the characters in the film; Shobowale and Kene – going at it on screen, across the desk in the police station and the walls are blue and you get this great dark feeling and I just… I looked at it for a couple of seconds and I told Mildred what she had.  I was like this is a good stuff.  You gotta take this seriously.

At first, I was actually thinking of not doing it because it’s a huge job and these things never pay well.  You know what I mean?  You’re never gonna get…  They go on forever, cos its art.  Its like a sculpture.  You can’t put a deadline on it as much as you want to, so you end up putting a lot more time into it than money will, you know, pay, compensate.  I kind of took the project because I knew what she had.  And then that was before Nollywood films, before I knew what they were doing.  So, I was comparing her stuff to films that I’d seen in the post house.  We’re getting six films a week in the post house.  I’m watching them all day long while I’m editing and I could tell her shots, her lighting, the acting was a piece of work that I wanted to be a part of, so I was really happy when she decided to go with me.

Www.naijarules.com:         How did you cope with the cultural challenge that comes with editing a movie like that?

Ty Rawls: Well, my background is … I’m black, white and native American.  So, as an American, I had that – and I think that most black Americans feel this way – they have this sort of curiosity, respect and sense of honour for Africa in general.  In general, we know that we are from there and we embrace that.  We might not speak about, (but) its something that’s in all of us.  We all feel that way.  If you challenge us, it will come out.  But its not something that we spend a lot of time voicing.  We kind of bury it because its an emotional thing.  Still, I think it kind of had a very special feel for me to be involved with something that’s going to be coming out of Africa.  You know the whole idea that I’d wanted these people on screen and I would feel it.  I can understand the pidgin English somehow, I don’t know how.  You know what I mean?  The language, the names… Iyabo Amoke, those things come natural to me for some reason.  So, for me, it was almost like something that I’d missed my entire life and was blessed with, I was able to visit Africa for six months.  And be there on screen, watch the neighbourhood, to watch how the people, hear the language, the mannerisms and movements, the whole culture… That, for me, was very special.  So, there was absolutely no hurdles to get over there.  It was all a pleasure.  I’m not sure if that would be with everybody, but it was that way with me.

Www.naijarules.com:         Let’s talk about the editing experience now.  You were in the studio with Mildred for all of six months.  What was she like?  Did she get on your nerves?

Ty Rawls: No.  I want to say… honestly I’ve never had a post-production experience that is sort of this smooth.  As a filmmaker, the woman is incredibly smart, okay?  So she’s got a creative brilliance.  But she also has a business mind and intelligence which I think you need in post-production, because to write, which she did, takes another kind of intelligence.  And then I think those two steps – while they’re very important – the film really gets made in the editing room.  And a lot of times, the right approach is to just forget about the script and see what you have.  Let the footage tell you what to do with the story.  Analyse your performances, analyse the shots you have, figure out… you know, build your scenes and see where they’re going, but don’t try and push it.  Let the force just take you there.  A lot of directors have a hard time with that because they really want to force it to fit their script.  She was much more able to filter out all of that and see what the film really wants to be, which is, I think, one of the best sort of trait you can have as a director in a post-production room.  So, no real issues. (LAUGHTER)

Www.naijarules.com:        What kind of software/hardware did you use to post 30  Days?

Ty Rawls: For this, we went with a DVC Cam deck and we used a G5 Pro with Final Cut HD.  So, its industry standard at this point.  For the replication, so its at the highest quality, we will get it replicated at Optical Disc West out in Valencia.  That’s what we plan at this point, which could change (it did).

The equipment worked well.  The great thing about Final Cut is it allows you to move fast.  Working with a system like Avid or something else tends to slow you down.  It also kind of handcuffs you when you want to do some fine-tuning maneuvers and effects and things like that.  I think Final Cut is going to be my first choice until Avid figures out how to make the stuff a little easier.

Www.naijarules.com:        In conclusion, Ty, do you see yourself doing other Nollywood movies in the future?

Ty Rawls: I hope so.  Look out.  You know, I started this process back in the ‘90s and I’d love to do something with Mildred in the future.  We’ll see.  We’ve both got a lot of ideas and we’ll take it one step at a time.

Www.naijarules.com:        Thank you Ty.

Ty Rawls: Alright.