According to Nigerian actress and filmmaker Omoni Oboli, the success of her film Love In Every Word still feels surreal. She was speaking on Arise 360 chat from Ontario, Canada, following the film’s performance on YouTube, where it amassed 4.3 million views in its first three days and has since surpassed 14 million.
“I feel amazing. I feel like God just decided this is the time to favour and renounce me to the entire world, and for me, that is so surreal,” Oboli said. “This movie literally shut down YouTube. We have been trending number one for the past 11 days—like, it doesn’t happen. It’s unheard of.”
Despite a brief takedown due to a copyright claim, Love In Every Word quickly returned to YouTube and continued attracting more eyeballs.
Responding to the copyright issue, Oboli said it wasn’t “something I want to talk about. But let’s just know that it was a very minor issue—really, really minor. We reached out to the parties involved, and it was resolved really quickly, and we moved on from it”.
She was more forthcoming when the questions moved over to her reasons for choosing YouTube as the platform for this particular work. “In all honesty, it wasn’t anything to do with the industry politics,” she explained. “I have movies that go to the cinemas all the time. However, I have a YouTube channel, and we release a new movie every week. We have a whole machinery, and we’re able to churn out feature-length movies—these types of movies, movies that are world-class standard—every single week on Omoni Oboli on YouTube.”
“This wasn’t a movie that we thought, ‘Let’s just make this for the cinema, and then there was politics and we decided to throw it to YouTube.’ No. This was made for our YouTube platform,” she said.
Oboli also addressed the high production value of her YouTube releases. “I know that the quality seems so much higher than what people normally see on YouTube, but this is how all our movies on YouTube are. When I started making movies on YouTube, I didn’t want to do business as usual. I didn’t want to just make ‘anyhow’ movies. I thought to myself, people already know me around the world for making movies for cinema, Netflix, Amazon—I’m not gonna come to YouTube and make subpar movies.”
She explained that her team has developed “a whole process…a whole machinery…that work with us”.
“We have scriptwriters. They write scripts, and the scripts come to me—I read the scripts, do my corrections. So there’s nothing that doesn’t pass through me,” she explained. “I read the scripts, do my corrections, send it back to the scriptwriters, and we go back and forth a few times until I feel it’s okay, because I’m a scriptwriter myself.”
“So it goes to the production team, they put everything together, get the actors, we get the location, and then we shoot. As a matter of fact, while shooting is going on, editing is already starting,” she said. “I actually edit my movies myself. The directors do not edit the films because they’re constantly working. Once the first cut is done, the editor sends it to me. I do my notes, I send it back to the editor, and we go back and forth a few times.”
Even sound design follows a strict process. “Initially when we started, once the sound design team is done, they would send it back to me to correct. But now they completely understand how I work, so I don’t have to interfere with sound design anymore, which is such a blessing because going through every single process of it is so tough.”
Nonetheless, the success of the film on YouTube came as a surprise, while giving credit to her lead actors, Uzor Arukwe and Bamike Olawunmi.
“Nobody saw this movie coming, I’m not gonna sit here and lie,” she admitted. “We knew they were going to give us great acting because the one thing about my channel is I’ll never pick actors because they are the most popular or because of anything. I pick actors simply because they are the best to interpret a certain script, they are the best to interpret what I want.”
She expressed joy at seeing Olawunmi and Arukwe receive praise for their performances. “I’m just so thankful they’re getting their flowers. They’ve been there for a while, and people can now see they’re brilliant actors, and it gives me so much joy.”
