What to Expect
Season 3 promises a grand finish: more politics, spectacular scenes, betrayals, battles, and drama like never before. There's also the arrival of a colonial power. As the final season, it’s essential every frame is set up for success all the way from cinematography through to post and final delivery. Audiences are waiting, and the expectation set from the first two seasons is high.
Our Role: Data Capture & Asset References
Our involvement focuses on ensuring that every aspect of the production is ready for the demands of visual effects. We begin with asset reference gathering, carefully photographing, scanning, and measuring costumes, props, weapons, set dressings, architectural details, and terrain features. These become the foundation for digital replicas, ensuring that 3D assets can be integrated seamlessly with live-action material.
We also carry out set and location surveys, using laser scans, LIDAR, and photogrammetry to capture the geometry and texture of historic buildings, constructed sets, and landscapes. By collecting accurate data about elevation, layout, and ambient lighting, we make sure the digital environments reflect the physical ones with precision. Alongside this, lighting and texture samples are collected throughout the day, capturing how surfaces behave under different conditions. These swatches—ranging from fabric and wood to metals and skin—are critical for achieving realistic shading and material response.
On set, we work closely with the cinematography and camera departments to ensure that every shot destined for VFX is filmed in the most VFX-friendly way possible. This means securing clean plates where available, adding tracking markers and motion references, ensuring proper coverage with multiple takes, and carefully monitoring exposure and metadata so that the digital elements will align effortlessly with the footage in post. At the same time, we manage all the metadata and camera information, logging every lens profile, focal length, and distortion map. With multiple cameras in play, we synchronize frame rates and shutter settings to eliminate technical mismatches that could cause problems later.
Why It Matters
This meticulous preparation is not just about precision—it’s about efficiency. When VFX artists receive complete reference material, accurate data, and well-captured footage, the integration of CGI becomes smoother, faster, and more cost-effective. For Shaka iLembe, a series already celebrated for its striking visuals and complex effects, these behind-the-scenes steps allow us to push the creative boundaries further and raise the standard for the final season.
What You Can Expect
The results of this groundwork will appear on screen as expansive landscapes enhanced with subtle digital extensions, grand spectacles such as battles and royal ceremonies where practical and digital elements blend invisibly, and a stronger visual continuity with earlier seasons while reaching new levels of depth and realism. As the story moves into the era of colonial encounters, expect to see new architectural and environmental reconstructions, richly textured costumes and props, and immersive settings like ports and ships that expand the scale of the world.
We are honoured to be part of this journey, helping craft the visual backbone that lets Shaka iLembe finish its epic tale in style. As shooting progresses, we’ll be posting behind-the-scenes snippets of our data captures, asset creation, and VFX setup to show how these invisible preparatory steps increasingly define what you’ll see on screen.
Stay tuned. The best is yet to come.
