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Accessing South Africas production talent --
Wed, 04 Oct 2017 10:35
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by Phil Rhodes
Production expertise in South Africa is at an all-time high - and the elephants actors are really talented. Phil Rhodes talks to one recent international co-production
Producer-director Richard Boddington is no stranger to Africa, having shot his last two films there. The first, Against the Wild 2: Survive the Serengeti stars Star Trek: Voyager alumna Jeri Ryan and is a sequel to the 2013 film Against the Wild, which was produced in Boddingtons home country of Canada.
The directors most recent film is Phoenix Wilder and the Great Elephant Adventure. Starring Elizabeth Hurley and Canadian Sam Ashe Arnold, it tells the story about an orphan who takes on a team of poachers with the help of a wild elephant.
The way international treaty co-productions work, begins Boddington, is theres a Canadian producer and one in the country you re going to shoot in. The script dictated that we shoot in Africa. Its my second Canada-South Africa co-production. Prior to shooting, you receive approval from both governments that its going to be an international treaty co-production, the two come together and bring everything to the table that the production needs.
This creates a mechanism for this most international of industries to share some of the risk involved in commercial filmmaking, and offers a route to tax rebates which can be more generous than those available to service productions, where there is no requirement that a certain amount of work is done in any particular jurisdiction.
If a large American shoot goes into Johannesburg, Boddington explains, They receive a tax rebate on their spend at a much lower rate than a co-production does but then, co-productions are going to be a smaller budget to refund.
The more generous refunds available to fully-accredited co-productions returns some 35% of the South African spend. In this situation, key production responsibilities must be shared between the countries involved.
Boddington continues, There are strict rules about the workload that is going to be done in each country you need a certain number of department heads. On Phoenix Wilder, composer Andries Smit and production designer Bobby Cardoso were South Africans, as is producer Grieg Buckle. He hired the entire crew securing the South African actors and basically being in charge of the entire movie with his staff.
The best pilots, at one third the price
I actually got the idea for Phoenix Wilder - a boy who gets lost in the bush, finds an elephant and they take on the poachers together - when I was in Africa in 2014 to scout Against the Wild 2, Boddinton recalls. South Africa is the only first-world, fully operational nation in Africa. Theres two unstable border states, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, where it would be unshootable. But South Africa still has its challenges - something as simple as the traffic lights not working. It may not seem like a big thing, but when youre trying to move cast and crew across the city, those lights become important.
The payoff, Boddington notes, involved some of filmmakings bigger-ticket toys: You can get the best helicopters loaded with the best camera gear and the best pilots in the world, and youre going to get it for literally a third the price, because of the exchange rate and the fact that things dont cost as much there.
One other bonus is the lack of unionisation: We can make a film without having to sign any union contracts or having to put up a bond. But that doesn t mean that theres any crew abuse, because South Africa has advanced labour laws.
Tax withholdings, Boddington says, are done at the source, youre expected to have proper insurance for your crew, for health and safety, pensions, and all that sort of stuff. Youre going into lunch a certain number of hours after call, theres going to be overtime after 12 hours, theyre going to be paid per diem. That stuff that North American crews are used to getting also exists there, there just isnt a union boss visiting the set.
While Boddington brought in director of photography Stephen Whitehead, a regular collaborator of his, the production filled the roles of camera assistant and assistant director locally.
Going where the elephants are
With wildlife action critical to the plot, Boddington sought out a base of operation near an elephant reserve in Bela Bela, about 100 miles north of Johannesburg, which the production used exclusively for two weeks.
Were shooting a pro-elephant, anti-poaching movie, theres no way I would have allowed us to put an elephant on a truck and move it to a location. We brought the crew to them. We also brought the sets and set pieces to them, so we could shoot the pieces that involved the elephants, and then we reconstructed them in Johannesburg. When you look at the final edit youll think that it was all in one location.
Boddington remembers that the elephants were motivated by only two things: Voice commands and oranges - there are no wires or prods or anything like that. Because I knew that, theres a bit of movie logic when the boy stumbles into the poacher camp. As he hears their jeeps approaching he goes through their supplies and hey, theres a bunch of oranges so he can give them to the elephant!
The elephants are treated like royalty on the reserve they live on. Theres a very advanced animal welfare department that governs the use of animals in film, and the elephants had more restricted working hours than our child actor did. We had two elephants that could double for each other.
Given the risks of working with animals, Boddington built animatronic elephant parts.
They were made at a creature effects shop in Cape Town. You could manipulate them very well with the cable system and pulleys. And the skill level is equal to that y
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