Rob: ‘When you know what’s happening in the foreground, then you know how you can cut that out and put in your background plate. It’s something that’s as old as filmmaking itself. Visual effects have been around since filmmaking started and as a Filmmaker you need to know what and how VFX works, otherwise your creativity will be stifled.’

iDidTht: ‘So this stuff really excites you?’
Rob: ‘Ha, yes. It’s like maths, but sometimes it just makes you want to scratch your brain out.’

Rob: ‘Directing VFX is kind of like being a magician. It’s really all about illusion. You want people to think the illusion is real and the real is an illusion. I want to trick you.’
iDiDtht: ‘So come on, how have you tricked us? What are some things we just wouldn’t know was VFX or was real?’
Rob: ‘Models.’
iDidTht: ‘Haha!’
Rob: ‘Okay, let’s go through some of my work…’

Die Antwoord – Enter The Ninja

Rob: ‘The visual effects on ‘Enter the Ninja’ for Die Antwoord basically just came down to the editing. We painted one wall white with black drawings on it and then another wall black with white drawings on it and then we cross-cut and matched the performances. It’s actually very basic and that’s the thing with visual effects, the simpler you make them the more effective they are. If it’s too tricksy the audience’s eye doesn’t buy it. Using visual effects to save a bad idea or image won’t work and it won’t be an image with integrity.’

MTN – Stickies

Rob co-directed the famous MTN ‘Stickies’ ad alongside Craig Wessels from Wicked Pixels back in 2009 – yup, way back when they still shot on ye olde film! 5 Days of filming and 2 months of animation and post – this production was indeed ambitious. Rob was in charge of directing all the live action photography and used some kickass photographic techniques.
Rob: ‘To get those stickies to look real was the big challenge. Think about thousands and thousands of little bits of paper and they’re all blowing in the wind.’

Rob: ‘And remember the light is constantly changing. So you have to make sure that the light moving on each piece of paper looks real, because light reflects…’

iDidTht: ‘So hang on, all of those stickies weren’t real?’
Rob: ‘Something that I really fought for is that we had to build one massive stickies-man, which the guys had to make, that was real. It’s how you trick the audience – you never know what is real or what is computer-generated. It’s also my way of messing with the post-production team because you say ‘Here’s the benchmark guys!’ So only the stickies-man on the silo is real and everything else, which was done in CG, has to look like that now. That’s how you get the audience’s trust.’

Jungle Oats – Fish

When Rob received the brief from the agency saying ‘It’s a story about a guy who takes his goldfish free-diving to meet some clownfish’ he never imagined it would take a month to pull off! After they found a goldfish with ‘a great personality’ the team shot the opening sequence of the fish and his surfer-bestie on the car and on the surfboard…all seemed pretty easy-going up until here bru.
Rob: ‘We arrived at this pool in Simon’s Town to shoot the goldfish in the bowl underwater but the owner simply refused, even though there was Perspex over the bowl, to let the fish anywhere near the water. So we had to improvise…
iDidtht: ‘So the goldfish was never in the bowl when you shot underwater?’
Rob: ‘Nope, just a little green ball. The coral reef was from stills in my archive I took when I shot BMW ‘Free Dive’ with Greg Gray. Because they were stills, we had to paint all the fish out so we could get the coral to move. The sea floor is imagery I had from the Red Sea, as is the coral wall. Then I needed fish to populate this world so we found fish tanks with blue backgrounds and I shot them at night in the tank. The sea anemones in the foreground were also added in and the barracudas were from stock footage. There are about 7 or 8 plates in that one shot.’

Rob: ‘We had a tank at a pet shop set up specifically conditioned for these fish a month beforehand so that they could acclimatize, and we shot the moment of the two fish interacting with split screen. We have 2 hours of footage spent on just trying to get that money shot of the clownfish saying hello to the goldfish.’