Misoya says sorry for movie premiere gaffe

The long-awaited premiere of the film Is the President Dead? on Saturday night at Bingu International Convention Centre in Lilongwe did not go according to plan. The movie producers had challenges in screening as they failed to convert the mastered version. As such, patrons left the venue disappointed as the movie could not play till the end. Our Staff Reporter BRIAN ITAI caught up with the producer Isaac Misoya to explain what happened. Excerpts: 

Q

: What happened during the premiere in Lilongwe?

A

: The problem we had at the premiere was that we showed a movie that was not a final copy that we planned for the night. I was in Tanzania for our final colour grading version and I came back on Tuesday. After the colour grading in Tanzania, we did not have enough time because our grand event was on December 1. Upon arriving here, we had to do a rendering of our final copy which proved problematic. On Thursday, we did all we could to have the problem fixed, but unfortunately we could not find a way round it.

Q

: Why did you not consider postponing the event so you could rectify the issues first?

A

: We thought of postponing the date after realising that the rendering was still a problem, but as a team we had different opinions. That made us proceed with the premiere because we had a solution of rendering it. Despite that we had hoped things would work out, but to our disappointment, it did not turn out that way. We still failed to render the movie. Then we had an idea of going back to our old version which was much smaller and it was playing. We had corrected some errors so that we could have it screened. As we were screening this, we still had problems with the software in processing the film to ensure a smooth flow. I would want to agree that the time space of rendering the movie was a challenge because we experienced something that we have never experienced before. We could not resolve it in time and we ended up showing the unfinished version as an alternative.

Q

: How are you going to compansate the people who paid but got a raw deal?

A

: One of the solutions was to postpone the Blantyre premiere so that we have the original copy of the movie. We are also planning to conduct a pre-screening as our initial plan. This week, we are doing all that. For our fans in Lilongwe, we will have the movie premiered again to compensate those who never watched it. We are doing our best to put in place measures to ensure that people who came for the first show should not pay by showing us the ticket or any evidence that they indeed bought the tickets.

Q

: Did you envisage that you would face the challenges you did?

A

: Unfortunately no! The big challenge was that when the computer didn’t play well, we were trying other versions which could play well and by doing that we found ourselves giving something that we never intended because if the second version could have played well then we would have witnessed what we did.

Q

: What message do you have for the people who came to the show?

A

: My first message is to apologise to all the film lovers for letting them down on that day. They supported us by coming out to watch the movie, beyond our expectations, but we didn’t do well. Let me assure them that we have a very well-produced movie, we had a good time working on it. It was not out of intention to destroy all that effort in one night. We are still looking for the best way to apologise to the people from Lilongwe.

Q

: When is the Blantyre premiere scheduled?

A

: The premiere is scheduled for December 23 at Amaryllis Hotel. We will provide more information about this within the week.