AI tools can enhance technical craft, boost Nollywood competitiveness - Marina El-Chalouhi
Abuja - 9 November 2025, 5:13pm WAT
Nollywood has grown on story, pace, and instinct. To push further, it needs more precision in cinematography, sound, and effects-without blowing up budgets or timelines.
At the CAVIC Festival, creative producer and cultural connector Marina El-Chalouhi made a simple case: AI won't replace Nigerian creativity-it can clear bottlenecks. In her words, "AI isn't coming to take your creativity; it's coming to supercharge it… Used well, AI becomes a creative amplifier, not a threat."
Why this matters for filmmakers
Great scripts can still stumble on noise-ridden dialogue, mismatched color, or thin VFX. These aren't just aesthetic issues; they affect audience trust and international distribution.
AI gives crews leverage: fewer repetitive tasks, more iteration, better polish-especially for small teams with big ideas.
Practical uses of AI across the production pipeline
- Story & previsualization: Rapid storyboards from sketches, animatics from poses, quick shot-planning with lens and blocking previews.
- Camera & color: Smart denoise for low-light shots, auto shot-matching, LUT suggestions, and upscaling older footage to meet platform specs.
- Sound: Dialogue clean-up, noise prints that adapt across scenes, fast ADR lip-match, and assistants for spatial mixes.
- VFX: Faster rotoscoping, sky and plate replacement, crowd extensions, and texture generation to support art departments.
- Localization: High-quality subtitles, voice cloning for dubbing with consent, timing alignment that respects performance.
- Ops & QC: Asset tagging, version control, continuity checks, auto-spotting of dead pixels, boom intrusions, or color shifts.
Ethics and control come first
El-Chalouhi's studio, Obsidian, runs on a human-led model: consented data, clear credit, and artist control. That matters in a fast market where short-cuts can burn trust.
Set guardrails early-source rights, disclosure to clients, approval gates for AI-assisted outputs, and secure storage for models trained on your assets.
Hollywood signals interest-Nollywood can move now
Obsidian is working with Imagine Entertainment on director-driven units that blend storyboard artists, CG generalists, editors, and AI specialists. That tells you where production is heading: tighter teams, smarter workflows, stronger results.
For Nollywood, the play is to adopt what serves the story and the schedule-nothing more, nothing less.
Learn more about Imagine Entertainment
A simple adoption plan for Nollywood teams
- Audit: Identify top 3 time sinks (e.g., noise cleanup, roto, shot matching). Pick pain points, not shiny tools.
- Pilot: Test 1-2 tools per department for 2 weeks. Measure hours saved and quality gains on a real scene.
- Policy: Write a one-page ethics note: data sources, consent, credit, watermarking, and client disclosure.
- Upskill: Train crew with short, role-based sprints. Editors learn denoise/match tools; sound teams learn dialogue AI; VFX teams standardize roto and cleanup.
- Scale: Lock workflows that proved value. Document presets, versioning rules, and naming conventions.
If you need structured learning paths for creative roles, explore AI courses for creative roles.
Marina El-Chalouhi: building bridges
El-Chalouhi works across Maison Kimia, Gang Group, and Obsidian-connecting music, brands, and film. Her focus is simple: respect for artists, smart use of technology, and real collaboration.
She's been active in Africa, with a studio presence in South Africa and ongoing work to connect Nigeria and Belgium. After her visit, she summed it up: "Nigeria is energy in motion… I leave Abuja with inspiration, admiration, and the desire to build more bridges between Europe and Nigeria."
The takeaway for creatives
Your taste and cultural truth are irreplaceable. Use AI to remove friction, protect your time, and raise the floor on technical quality.
Start small, ship better, repeat.
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