Enhancing Nigeria’s Response to HIV and Aids (ENR) is the BBC World Service Trust’s new Pan-Nigerian, DFID-funded project which will focus on lowering the prevalence of HIV in the country.
An aspect of this is to help capacity building at national and state TV stations. This involves creating a TV training team which will then go out and provide training at local stations, including training on HIV reporting and co-producing with the station for several weeks.
Ambika Samarthya, an international trainer based in Abuja reports on the first stages of the three year project.
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After the feedback we received from the research and internal reviews of our two original TV pilots, I began training Devaan and Nasiru in the techniques and styles of documentary TV production.
Documentary TV is not necessarily news, but real-life stories told through people who are not actors: character-driven, real life narratives. It is not only the direction where our templates were headed, but what audiences globally have been leaning towards.
I explained to them the two necessities of this style of production: interesting stories and engaging characters. I then asked them both to choose a topic they were deeply invested in and to find a story and character with whom they would shoot an interview with.
