Southlight

Everything between your plane landing and the first slate

Southlight is a production service company in Cape Town. Locations, permits, crew, kit and transport for shoots anywhere between Table Bay and the Orange River.

See the work

Locations

Fifteen years of scouting files: farm werfs, dune fields, brutalist stairwells, a decommissioned cold store outside Ceres. We shoot the recce ourselves, get the owner onto a written day rate, and hand you a folder with sun angles, ablutions and cell coverage already marked.

Permits

City of Cape Town film permits, SANParks, CapeNature, Transnet and provincial roads. We file the applications, carry the public liability, and stand at the barrier on the day so nobody from your side has to argue with a traffic marshal at half past four in the morning.

Crew

A book of about four hundred people we have actually worked with — sparks, grips, art department, standby carpenters, medics, wranglers. We crew to the size of the job rather than the size of the invoice, and we tell you when you have hired one truck too many.

Kit and transport

Camera and lighting hired from the houses in Salt River, generators, honeywagons and unit tents out of our own yard in Epping, and five 4x4s with tow bars for the mornings the road stops being a road somewhere past Sutherland.

Ruan Malherbe, line producer

I started as a runner on a beer commercial in Prince Albert in 2007 and never left the industry or the province. Southlight is me, four full-time staff above a printer on Bree Street, and a book of people I would put on my own job. I read your script or your boards, work out what it actually costs to shoot here, and then produce it. You get one number to call and one person accountable for it. When a farm gate is locked at ten the night before, that is my phone that rings, not yours.

Six things that come with the job

  1. A costed budget in your currency and in rand, with the DTI rebate modelled both with and without it.
  2. A recce pack for every location: stills, sun path, power, ablutions, cell signal and the nearest trauma unit.
  3. Permits filed and paid, with the numbers printed on the call sheet and hard copies in the unit car.
  4. R50 million public liability and full COIDA on every crew member, certificates issued before shoot day one.
  5. A line producer on set every single shoot day — no handover to a junior once the recce is signed off.
  6. Closed books within fifteen working days of wrap, every receipt scanned, indexed and reconciled.

The standing crew

Zanele Mthembu
Zanele MthembuProduction manager

Runs the diary, the crew bookings and the petty cash, and has never once mislaid a permit. Speaks isiZulu, English and enough Afrikaans to get a farm gate opened on a Sunday.

Deon Fortuin
Deon FortuinLocation manager

Twenty-two years scouting the West Coast and the Karoo. Keeps the location files, settles the day rate with the owner, and knows which farm roads wash out after the April rain.

Priya Naicker
Priya NaickerProduction accountant

Budget, VAT and the rebate paperwork. Closes the books in fifteen days and will tell you the day before you overspend rather than the week after.

Sipho Adonis
Sipho AdonisUnit and transport

Drivers, vehicles, generators and the yard in Epping. Gets forty people and eleven tonnes of kit onto a farm outside Merweville by call time, in the dark.

Eleven days across three provinces and we never once had to solve a problem ourselves. The permits were done, the roads were open, the trucks were where they said they would be, and the books balanced to the cent.
Marta Riedel, executive producer, Halbmond Film, Hamburg

Serviced for

Send a brief

Boards, a script, or a paragraph — whatever you have. We answer inside a working day and put a number to it inside three.

Southlight

Production services · Cape Town, South Africa