We dive into the CGI, sound effects, director relationships & more, on Kings of Jo'burg, the action-packed South African Netflix series that has taken the world by storm, with Post-Production studio owner, Bruce McLaren-Lyall.
"Coming up into season three, Krotos Studio sped up the process immensely for us"
I run a postproduction facility where we provide post production for the film and television industry in South Africa. We've been doing a lot of film & we went recently in the last couple of years, started getting into television.
We were lucky enough to pick up the postproduction on season two of Kings of Jo'burg after working on a series called Terre Lake Drive for UMC with Director/Showrunner Samad Davis.
He decided afterwards that he'd like to work on season two of Kings of Jo’burg, which is where working on the series came together.
We've just wrapped season three with him. We've tried to stick with telling true stories, getting away from the traditional rom-com sort of route.
South Africans like a bit of comedy, so we've looked more at heartfelt stories. By doing so, We've carved a nice niche for ourselves in the industry!
...Initially it was a CG mermaid!
Mamlambo was her name. Working out the VFX side of things was challenging; Its a complex workflow sending editorial work, getting VFX done, compositing, 3D work, then re-assmebling it. That was a challenge for us initially.
"Krotos Studio was constantly there. Quickly running something, Dropping onto the timeline...eight out of ten times, we'd hit the nail on the head instantly"
We had a good team who worked us through the pipeline to streamline things, so by season 3, the bigger challenge for us was the amount of VFX work that we actually did, for a small team, we did over 695 VFX shots in the show.
Everybody really pulled together to put on a show that we're very proud of. We can't compete with the bigger budgets of Hollywood and all that, so from a budget point of view and then the amount of VFX that that kind of was the biggest challenge we had on the show.
The nice thing for us is that we are all in-house, including VFX. There's a company called Luma Animation. They do all the animations, all in-house at my studio, Sequence Post. We did all the post-production, coloring & editing. It smooths out a lot of the normal issues where you have to send it off and wait for it to come back.
We had the privilege of walking down the hallway to fix a problem in another department. It's never fast with 3D and VFX, but it's better than outsourcing to other companies.
"Whether it's a clothes, wrestling walking, ambience... whatever the case might be, we're able to get it onto the timeline almost instantly with Krotos Studio"
Being such a big show with a lot of moving parts, the timelines are always a challenge. Getting the story to Netflix for picture lock, getting all the stakeholders involved, notes...it's a long process.
I've got a great relationship with director Samad Davis. We call it 'going boxing', like we get into the ring and spar at the editing table, to get the story arcs through the whole show. I love that part of it, and I don't see it as a challenge but it's been really exciting to see what we've achieved.
It can be challenging trying to get the director's vision down. In season two, I didn't have Krotos Studio, so I was manually fishing for stuff. But coming up into season three, Krotos Studio sped up the process immensely for us. Whether it's a piece of clothes, wrestling or walking, or some ambience, whatever the case might be, we're able to get it onto the timeline almost instantly and also play live with some ideas.
The music side of Krotos Studio is really nice. We did some nice things while playing around with that. It helped us to stay in the moment,without going down the rabbit hole and getting lost.
Yes, it changes the whole way you work on the timeline. The director is specific in what he wants in the energy of the sound.
Being able to quickly just source stuff, drop it onto the timeline, putting some ambience in, or an explosion or bullet hits, guns firing…being able to do that fast, you would normally do it without having a huge big library of sound effects and having to go through all of them.
It Makes the experience, I think, for everybody, a lot more seamless.
He loves it! He loves all the gadgets and the tools that keep him in the flow. He understands the process, but I think we had a lot of fun this time with season three.
Krotos Studio was constantly there. Quickly just running something. Dropping onto the timeline. Eight out of 10 times, we'd hit the nail on the head instantly!
Absolutely. We wanted to deliver an edit that has all of the elements that would be in a scene at picture lock, so there's no gray area.
And when it gets to picture lock, then you listen to the final audio, you'll notice that it's just mixed better, obviously, because that's not our field.
But essentially, it's the same thing because everything is there ready to go. It's very important to make sure that everybody down the chain understands what the scene is, how it feels, how it sounds.
We work in Adobe Premiere Pro exclusively for editorial, and we finish in DaVinci Resolve.
It was a different experience. We have a library built through years of slowly collecting stuff, But trying to search it or find something would take time…that time takes you away from being in the edit.
For me, it was it literally chalk and cheese. It was a completely different experience having the ability to play sounds live, with the timeline running. Manually scrolling through a library, dragging sounds onto timelines, previewing it…It's not really working.
Whereas our workflow with Krotos Studio was start the timeline, pre roll it, select a couple of presets and play them live and drag that onto the timeline.
…It was a lot more successful than trying to manually search for stuff!
One of the things on this series that we struggled with was vehicles, to be honest.
But now Krotos Studio has those too, I wish I had them for this! *Laughs*.
It's good to see them in there now, because there were a lot of vehicles. But weapons, guns, all of that was really, really solid.
The biggest thing for me, from an editing point of view, is not being taken away from your timeline. You don’t want to spend time searching for something previewing stuff without getting out of the edit.
That to me is the biggest thing. it's just unbeatable.
Thanks to Bruce for his time on this interview!
You can stream all three seasons of Kings of Jo'burg on Netflix.