VES comes to Cape Town
South African visual effects artists work on some of the largest productions in the world. They do it from Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban, often for studios headquartered eight thousand kilometres away, and frequently without their contribution being visible anywhere outside the credits.
What we have not had is a local chapter of the Visual Effects Society.
That is changing, and I want to explain why it matters more than it might sound.
What a chapter actually does
The VES is the industry's professional honorary society. Membership is peer-reviewed and it is one of the few credentials in visual effects that means something consistent across borders.
A local chapter does three things.
It makes people visible. An artist in Cape Town with VES membership is legible to a hiring supervisor in London or Vancouver in a way that a strong reel alone is not. Credentials travel where reputations do not.
It creates a room. Our industry here is smaller than it looks and more scattered than it should be. People who ought to know each other do not. A chapter is a recurring reason to be in the same room, which is where most useful things start.
It gives us a voice. On training, on rates, on regulation, on how the industry adapts to generative tooling — a professional body can say things an individual freelancer cannot afford to.
Where we are
We held an inaugural meetup, hosted by Refinery and sponsored by the Cape Town International Animation Festival, and the turnout answered the question of whether there is appetite for this.
I spoke about where generative tooling actually sits in a production pipeline, which is a conversation this industry is having anxiously and often badly. It was a better discussion than I expected.
What we need
Members. That is genuinely the whole thing.
A chapter needs a critical mass of VES members in the region, so the most useful thing anyone reading this can do is find out whether they qualify. A great many South African artists do qualify and have never applied, usually because nobody told them it was for people like them.
It is for people like you. Credits on qualifying productions, a couple of sponsors, and an application.
If you are in the industry here and want to know whether you qualify, or you want to be told when the next meetup happens, get in touch.
Why I am doing this
I have worked in Sydney, Adelaide, Bristol and Cape Town. The talent here is not behind. The infrastructure is not behind either.
What we have been missing is the connective tissue — the professional structures that make an industry a thing rather than a collection of people who happen to do similar work. That is not glamorous work and nobody gets a credit for it. It still needs doing.