For Martini Akande, editing started as a solution to a problem.
He and his friends were making short films, but the editors they worked with often took too long or struggled to execute what the young filmmakers had in mind. Akande had some experience editing wedding and event videos, so he decided to try it himself.
What began as a way to get their projects finished gradually became something else. The more he edited, the more interested he became in what happened to a story once it left the set.
“There was something powerful about shaping a story in the edit, choosing the right moments, the right rhythm, the right emotional beats,” Akande tells The Nollywood Reporter.
Editing was not always the plan. Akande had originally wanted to act. He was involved in his secondary school’s drama club despite being a science student and performed at school events as an actor and stand-up comedian.
He still sees himself as someone who could act, but the opportunities were not coming. Editing offered another way to stay close to filmmaking, and eventually he began to see it as a craft in its own right.
His training came mostly from the internet and practice. He started with friends, YouTube tutorials and trial and error before taking online courses and masterclasses.
Channels such as Film Editing Pro, No Film School, This Guy Edits and Every Frame a Painting became part of his learning. He also studied Walter Murch’s In the Blink of an Eye, which helped shape the way he thinks about the relationship between editing, emotion and storytelling.
Akande’s understanding of editing goes beyond putting scenes in the right order. He describes it as a form of audience manipulation, where timing can determine how viewers respond to what they are watching.
“When an audience feels something when they are watching a scene, apart from the fact that the writing has done its job and the actors and the director have done their work, making that moment come to light at the right time for the right duration is the work of the editor,” he says.
A joke may need to land quickly. A dramatic moment may need to linger. An action sequence may need to move faster than the footage originally allows.
Akande points to speed ramps as one example. An actor jumping into a car might not physically move with the speed expected of a professional thief, but manipulating the footage can make the action feel faster and more convincing.
“That kind of generates an emotion from the audience. They either clap or they scream, and that is you as an editor manipulating them.”
The same principle can apply to an emotional scene. A reaction shot from elsewhere in the footage can be placed at a different point to change how an audience reads a moment.
For Akande, these choices are part of the work that most viewers never notice. That, he says, is usually a sign that the editing is doing what it should.
“Rarely do you see people come out of a film and say, ‘Oh, that editing was good,’ except for maybe filmmakers,” he says. “But most of the general audience, they’ll say, ‘Oh, that was a good film,’ and that’s good enough.”
Poor editing, however, is harder to hide.
“Even those who are not filmmakers, they will spot it. ‘Why is that shot? Why did they cut to that shot? Why are we seeing this now?’”
Akande has edited twelve Nollywood feature films, including Glamour Girls, Brotherhood, Gangs of Lagos and Christmas in Lagos. His work on Brotherhood earned him a Best Picture Editor nomination at the ninth Africa Magic Viewers’ Choice Awards.
Of those projects, Brotherhood remains the one he considers the most technically demanding.
At the time, the film was one of the larger action productions coming out of Nollywood, with several elaborate set pieces. One bridge sequence alone was filmed over the course of a week.
“There was so much riding on it,” he says. “I had to come in with my A-plus game.”
The challenge was making the footage work as a complete action sequence. With scenes involving gunfire, jumps and multiple moving parts, the timing of each shot mattered.
“Everything can fall flat if it is not well edited,” Akande says. “Every time someone is shooting, someone is jumping off a bridge, everything must be properly done, every clip must be used at the right time for the right duration.”
The film also required him to move between different tones. Alongside the action were romance and betrayal, giving the edit more than one emotional register to manage.
“Brotherhood had romance, it had action, it had betrayal,” he says. “So it had all those things. Everything stuffed in one film.”
Akande was still editing the film on his birthday in September 2022. He had to choose between spending the day with his friends and fiancée and staying with the project.
“It was tough not to go and hang out with my friends and fiancée on my birthday,” he says, but those around him understood the demands of the job.
“If there’s any film I’ll be editing on my birthday, then it must be this film.”
The eventual AMVCA nomination was important to him, but Akande does not see awards as the best measure of an editor’s progress.
He is more interested in whether his work is improving. A nomination or a film landing on a major streaming platform does not necessarily mean an artist is developing.
“Am I getting better as an artist? Am I taking on new challenges?” he asks.
He points to editors who may not have worked on films released on Netflix or received major nominations but are still doing excellent work.
“You can be getting all these nominations and all these things and you are still stagnant for five years and you are not improving as an artist.”
His concerns about editing extend to the wider structure of Nollywood’s post-production system. Akande has also worked as a post-production consultant and says the industry has made progress through training initiatives, but there are still gaps in how projects move through post.
One problem, he says, is that editors can end up taking on responsibilities that should belong to post-production coordinators or supervisors.
“If roles like that become a thing in Nollywood, and people are trained for those roles, there will be so much improvement.”
He also sees the lack of standardised processes as a burden on producers and executive producers. Post-production is often the longest stage of a film’s production cycle, and unclear workflows can make the process more difficult than it needs to be.
Clearer systems, he argues, would help everyone understand rates, deliverables and how many rounds of revisions are expected before a project is completed.
Akande is now interested in helping close another gap: the space between beginners and established professionals.
He has done one-on-one mentorships and internships and wants to eventually organise workshops that can give aspiring editors a clearer route into the industry.
“There are a lot of people who want to come into editing and a lot of already established editors,” he says. “You don’t have a lot of people in that intermediate space. So that space needs to be filled up.”
His advice to someone starting out is not to wait for an industry connection.
“Have a community,” he says.
That could mean finding friends who are also trying to direct, act, write or work in sound. They can make short films together, exchange skills and build portfolios without waiting for professional productions to invite them in.
They can also volunteer.
Akande remembers going to people’s sets and offering to edit their short films for free. At the beginning, the goal was simply to have something to show the next person who asked what he had done.
“Nobody’s going to give you their cinema film to edit if you don’t have something on your portfolio that you’ve done before.”
He believes young filmmakers can build that portfolio horizontally, alongside people at a similar stage, rather than constantly trying to reach people above them.
“Grow with your peers, grow with your friends, grow with people that are more accessible to you.”
It is also how some of his own professional relationships began. Several of the people he now works with regularly are people he met while they were starting out as editors, writers and actors.
“I sound like a broken record now,” Akande says, laughing.
But for him, the point remains simple: build with the people around you, keep making things and allow the work to improve over time.
