WHAT WE OFFER
FUTURE DRIVEN IMAGERY, GROUNDED IN CRAFT
Craft first. The technology serves it.
Lenscowboy is a visual effects and production-technology studio in Cape Town, built on twenty-five years of feature and episodic work — Mad Max: Fury Road, Hotel Mumbai, The LEGO Batman Movie, Black Sails, Our Girl, House of David.
We supervise, we deliver, and we build the pipeline tools we could not buy.
VFX SUPERVISION & PRODUCTION
End-to-end VFX for film and television, from script to final master.
Pre-production. Script costings and breakdowns, methodology planning, bidding, and technical consulting before a camera turns.
On set. VFX supervision, recces, shot planning, HDR and data acquisition. We have supervised on set for the BBC on Our Girl — CG aircraft, ambush and gunfire augmentation, set extensions across a two-month shoot — and for Starz on Black Sails. On House of David we supervised delivery of over three hundred shots, including Unreal Engine LED volume photography integrated into live-action plates.
Post. Pipeline design, vendor coordination, ingestion through to final master delivery, VFX editorial and finishing.
Some jobs do not need a supervisor and a vendor list. They need one team that takes the sequence and returns it finished.
On Lost Gold for BBC Studios and National Geographic we were the sole vendor. We modelled the SS Central America from historical reference — full hull, superstructure and deck detail on the 1857 sidewheel steamer at the centre of the series — built and rendered the ocean simulation in Houdini, composited in Nuke, and delivered direct to the BBC against broadcast spec.
Modelling, FX simulation, lighting, compositing, grading, delivery. One point of contact, one person accountable.
FULL-SERVICE DELIVERY
REAL-TIME & VIRTUAL PRODUCTION
Unreal Engine pipelines, LED volume stage workflows, and interactive experiences.
We built and scaled our own virtual production pipeline in Unreal, worked in real time on campaigns for Google, Volvo and Volkswagen with Preymaker in New York, and contributed to an animated series produced entirely in real time.
GENERATIVE AI IN PRODUCTION
Most studios have worked out that generative tools can make an image. The unsolved problem is making that image behave like production output.
That is the work we do.
Colour management. Generative output arrives in whatever the vendor felt like. We run an ACES-based normalisation layer so the result lands in a gradeable, spec-compliant delivery rather than a screenshot that falls apart in a grade.
Provenance and IP hygiene. C2PA Content Credentials and a hash-chained provenance ledger, so a production can demonstrate where every frame came from. We also offer selectable generation modes, letting a producer trade output quality against IP strictness deliberately rather than discovering the trade later. If your legal department has questions about generative content — and it should — this is the answer.
Consistency across a campaign. Character identity that holds across versions, shots and months, rather than a new face every time someone hits generate.
Vendor evaluation. We run a standardised twelve-test funnel against production criteria: colour behaviour, prompt-format sensitivity, licence terms, output rights, deployment restrictions. Vendor claims and vendor behaviour are rarely the same thing, and the licence terms are frequently the part that matters most.
Pipeline integration. Bringing generative tooling into the DCCs a team already uses — Maya, Houdini, Blender, Unreal — rather than asking artists to work somewhere else.
We work across the current generation of models and integrate them behind a single job graph. We also build and fine-tune locally hosted models where a client needs control over style, secure handling of sensitive material, or training on their own datasets.
TOOLS WE HAVE BUILT
We build our own because what we needed did not exist. Every one of these came out of a job where the available tooling ran out before the delivery date did.
LENSCOWBOY PIPELINE — in commercial release A multi-tenant production pipeline that puts the current generation of generative models behind one job graph, with colour-managed output, provenance on every frame, and per-project asset and character management. Built so a production can use these tools without inheriting a mess.
LINK — in release Node-graph compositing in the browser. Generative work usually forces an artist to accept or discard a whole frame; LINK lets them isolate, adjust and re-run parts of an image the way they would in any compositing package. The artist stays in the loop rather than being routed around it.
PAL — in release Real-time 3D previsualisation and layout. Turn a location, a reference photograph or a description into navigable space you can block a scene in, then hand the result downstream as usable geometry rather than a mood board.
LCBE — in release Script-to-shot breakdown. Ingests Final Draft and Fountain and returns a structured, tiered VFX shot list with standard numbering — the bridge between a screenplay and a bid, in an afternoon rather than a fortnight.
LSV (Lenscowboy Studio Vault) — in release Provenance and IP hygiene for productions that need to prove where their frames came from. C2PA Content Credentials, an auditable ledger, and selectable generation modes so a producer can set how strict the IP position needs to be before the work starts rather than after.
SATLAS — live and free to use A public atlas of the South African and global creative industries, mapping studios, facilities and crew. Built as industry infrastructure, not a product. map.lenscowboy.com
GATE — in development On-set capture and ingest. Media offload with checksum verification and content credentials applied at the point of capture, so provenance starts on the day rather than being reconstructed in post.
LARGE — in development Integration layer bringing generative tooling into the applications artists already work in — Maya, Houdini, Blender and Unreal — instead of asking them to work somewhere else.
Available as a platform, as part of a delivery, or as consulting on your own pipeline.
TRAINING & TEAM ENABLEMENT
Bespoke programmes for teams adopting generative tooling: where these models fail, what the licence terms actually permit, and how to integrate them without breaking a pipeline that already works.