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TV Series — Historical Epic
Shaka iLembe
CG Supervisor on Season 1, VFX & CG Supervisor on Season 2 of the most expensive production in South African television history. Luma delivered 600+ VFX shots on Season 1 with 20+ artists across 12 months of post: environment extensions, period-accurate set enhancements, battle sequences, and atmospheric effects. The series opened to 3.6M+ viewers in its first week and won 13 SAFTAs in 2024, including Best Achievement in Visual Effects. Season 2 premiered on 15 June 2025 with more sequences, a larger creature roster, and deeper on-set involvement.
VFX Reel — 3D Hyena, Luma Animation
Hyena — Behind the Scenes
CG Supervision (S1), VFX & CG Supervision (S2)
On Season 1, oversaw the CG department's output and visual consistency across environment extensions, creature work, and crowd sequences. On Season 2, owned the full VFX pipeline from shot turnover to final delivery, with far more on-set involvement. With 600+ shots to deliver, we drove storyboarding and previs for every major sequence, running a mixed pipeline of Blender, Houdini, Karma, and Nuke under broadcast deadlines.
Environment & Crowd Systems
Recreating early-19th-century KwaZulu-Natal demanded environment fidelity new to local broadcast. We built massive indigenous vegetation libraries in SpeedTree and Houdini, and I developed a procedural layout tool for scattering them with automatic LOD handling. For battles, we built custom Houdini crowd systems with keyframed digital doubles, over a match-move pipeline I oversaw personally.
Challenges Overcome
Even the most expensive production in South African television history ran on a fraction of an international episodic budget. The hardest constraint was scale: 600+ shots with a 20+ artist team across 12 months of post, on a schedule with no give. The procedural environment and crowd systems were the answer, automating months of hand-work. Period accuracy had to hold for both a Zulu-language audience and a global one, in 4K HDR delivery. Season 2 raised the bar with a larger creature roster, and we hit it without growing the team proportionally.
Award-Winning VFX
The work won the 2024 SAFTA for Best Achievement in Visual Effects. Shaka iLembe became the most awarded drama in SAFTA history with 13 wins, plus two Septimius Awards and multiple NFTAs.
Creature & Crowd Work
Photorealistic CG Creature
Battle Sequence — VFX Crowd Extension
CG Creature Development — Hyena, Bat, Bee
Press & Coverage
Open to EU and UK supervision roles from October 2026.
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