Blue Bolt was the sole VFX vendor in charge and completed more than 400 shots for this project. Some of these shots required the creation of digital environments.

The story needed to show Orlando township in Soweto the way it looked in the 40s and 50s. But the current Orlando changed a lot compared to the one existing during Mandela's lifetime. So it was decided to build only the first 3 streets composed of 30 buildings as an exterior set. The remaining couple of thousand houses would be added later digitally.

In order to create the digital township, Blue Bolt took photos of the main houses where the action takes place and built 3D houses by photogrammetry with Enwaii. The VFX team took detailed photos of all the brick work in order to get high quality textures for their assets. Once the houses were created the artists duplicated them and made variations in order to replace the surroundings fields with the township.

This part of Blue Bolt's works enabled the director to create nice establishing shots helping the audience to understand the situation in Orlando during Mandela's lifetime.

MOVE THE CURSOR ON THE IMAGE to compare the images before and after VFX created by Blue Bolt.