Nairobi News

Film producer Rueben Odanga has termed his telenovela ‘Selina’ as his most expensive project.

Despite the popular series that starred actor Pascal Tokodi, Celestine Gachuhi, Peter Kamau, Brenda Wairimu, raking over Sh300 million for the five years it aired on Maisha Magic, its production cost an arm and a leg.

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In an interview with Nairobi News, Odanga revealed that putting together the props for the show alone cost him Sh4 million.

“The genre of the show you are doing dictates the input. The client wanted Selina not to look rich, but to be rich. Furniture for Selina was super expensive.

We bought the bed at Sh280,000. Furnishing Selina, I mean the house alone was around Sh4 million. From lamp shades, curtains, carpet, utensils you name it,”

There were also losses realized.

“Selina the first three seasons we hit nil. We never made any profit. There were small things at play like the number of episodes.

For instance, if you are going to pay me little per episode then you need to pay me more, and if you are going to give me 260 episodes per season then I can work with little money. Initially, we had confusion in regards to that,”

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But that wasn’t the only thing.

“The other issue of us not making a profit was the fact that Selina was being written in India and we executed it here.

In such a scenario, you don’t know what the writer will write in the next ten episodes and that comes with cost implications that you know nothing about.

So if the writer decides to put five weddings, that becomes costly because shooting a single wedding for Telenovela has to be colourful and fancy because.

That’s costly already. The owner of a wedding ground will also charge you like it is if you are doing a real wedding. If you hire Chiavari seats, they will cost you. All these things put together amount to a cost,”

During the shooting of the telenovela, Odanga says he quickly realized his major expense was a wardrobe for the cast.

“We quickly realized our biggest expense was wardrobe. Remember telenovela’s target audience is women and they can easily tell when a wig is cheap or not so we had to get expensive ones.

We are talking about Sh50,000-Sh65000 and I had to change it every two months. There was a time I had three weddings in one episode all these were costs. I haven’t talked of my lead characters’ wardrobe because they are the face of the show it was expensive.”

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