Joe Pistorius has been making steady inroads into the on-set supervision business.
So it happened that he needed an extra hand on set of the Clint Eastwood movie currently being produced in SA.
Under the direction of experienced American VFX supervisor Michael Owens, production co-ordinator Penny Runge, and guided by CIS Vancouver’s Peter Hart and Charlie Clavadetscher, I was exposed to a wider world of digital lighting, and spent a day at Newlands stadium shooting HDRI’s with Joe, and an old colleague of mine Jeremy Hattingh.

Peter and Charlie mapped Newlands stadium (and later Ellis/Coca-cola park) out with survey gear (down to the width of the painted white lines on the field!)  as the cameras rolled, while Joe, Jeremy and I charged around the stadium shooting relevant HDRI’s under Michaels supervising eye. Joe and Jeremy shot sequences of a sphere and a color chart, with one half of the sphere chrome and the other half matte grey. I captured a range of exposures with an 8mm, 180 degree Sigma lens on a full frame Canon camera. Both lighting maps will be employed to recreate the lighting of the stadiums once they are filled with digital extras.

A week later we were all in Jozi covering Ellis park stadium (now called Coca-cola stadium. Has it been that long?) and watching the legends of Eastwood, Freeman and Damon at work.
It was a vigorous exercise but I loved every minute of it! The production employed 1500 extras as a sample stand-in of the crowd from that memorable day back in 95 and, true to the bok spirit, the extras really exhibited a festive spirit.

Sure, we ran all over the stadium, non-stop, for 8 hours every day, trying our best to keep up with Michael and his requirements, but, as we worked, we were treated to performances by Morgan Freeman (looking the spitting image of Madiba as he greeted the Boks and the All-blacks), rehearsed set pieces of rugby supervised by Chester Williams, featuring Matt Damon as Francois Pienaar and Scott Eastwood, Clint's son, as Joel Stransky, and an awesome Haka performance by the team playing the All-blacks.

I got a lot of sun, plenty of exercise, great food, and a new look at a deeper level of digital lighting for visual effects. We were joined by another Canadian photographer who is working locally for a time. Austin Andrews and I were the HDRI cats while Jeremy and Joe herded small groups of extras around the stadium, clustering them around their spheres in an attempt to capture relevant lighting, reflections and occlusion.
I sorted data the last few days, as the crew shot out of a flight simulator, and later at the Sandton sun hotel, and learnt a little more about how and where our work was going to be used.

All in all a great job. Clint seems to be a unique director. He is the only one of the big names that ate meals with the crew every evening. He is soft spoken and incredibly good-natured. It was great watching him and being so close to him. He is the consummate professional, very rarely shooting more than one take. He seems to have complete trust in the people he works with, these being people he has worked with for many years.

I look forward to seeing the result, with more than 60 000 digital extras bringing that stadium down once again, the 747 screaming over head, and Francois Pienaar and Nelson Mandela reminding us once more of the very special thing that happened to this country  in 1995.