I have worked as a motion designer for a variety of studios and clients around the world including Darby Films, FinCoach Financial, Qwili, Indie Animation, and 2Enable (in partnership with Microsoft and the Mpumalanga Department of Education).
I began producing augmented reality filters in 2020 using Spark AR. I also utilize Blender, Photoshop, and Premiere to create assets for my filters.
Links to my augmented reality filters on Instagram:
Electric South is a nonprofit that provides mentorship, production services, funding, and exhibition for a network of artists across Africa. Electric South helps artists explore their worlds through immersive, interactive stories using virtual and augmented reality and other digital media. These projects have screened at over 80 international film festivals and events, including Tribeca Film Festival, Berlinale, World VR Forum Festival, and Sundance Film Festival.
The New Dimensions lab brings together multidisciplinary artists from across the African continent as well as advisors from around the world, including experts from leading institutions such as IDFA DocLab, Tribeca Film Festival, Oculus, Pixar, Imisi3D, Black Rhino VR, Eden Labs, and MUTEK.
I shot and edited the behind-the-scenes content for Electric South’s 2019 and 2022 editions of the New Dimensions Virtual & Augmented Reality Lab.
Baz-Art is a nonprofit that supports and develops public murals and street art projects across South Africa.
Baz-Art produces the International Public Art Festival (IPAF) in Cape Town, which has commissioned over 180 local and international artists to paint hundreds of public murals across South Africa.
I worked with Baz-Art to create a virtual street art experience to allow Baz-Art’s many international supporters to experience the public murals produced by Baz-Art and its artists. This virtual reality experience was also screened to hundreds of viewers at the 2019 Cape Town Bastille Day celebration.
This project was a finalist in the SMME Award Category of the 23rd Business ad Arts South Africa (BASA) Awards. BASA’s mandate is to foster collaboration between business and the arts, bringing positive change and enabling a better future for artists.
XO Africa is an international events and travel agency providing luxury tailor-made services within the Southern Africa countries of Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and South Africa.
I created 360 photo, video, and VR experiences for XO Africa to help share their luxury tourism offerings in Sub-Saharan Africa to international clients in Europe. This included interactive virtual tours of venues and activities, as well as a virtual reality headset experience that was screened to audiences in France, Switzerland, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
Click here to view a sample of XO Africa web based 360 tours.
In 2014, to launch Intsikelelo and fundraise for our partner community-based nonprofit in Khayelitsha, South Africa, we shot and released a video “GoPro: South African Orphanage” that went viral— reaching the front page of reddit and garnering press from Ellen Degeneres, Good Morning America, Huffington Post, Daily Mail, NY Daily News, BuzzFeed, and many others.
This caught the attention of GoPro and led Intsikelelo to earn one of GoPro’s first ever nonprofit sponsorships. We helped launch GoPro’s corporate social initiative GoPro for a Cause, and together, we produced videos that received over 1 million views on GoPro’s social media channels. These videos promoted a crowdfunding campaign that raised over $170,000 with the help of GoPro’s donation matching, successfully funding the construction of the Langbos Children’s Centre.
More info:
https://gopro.com/en/za/news/gopro-for-a-cause-and-intsikelelo
In 2018, my photos, videos, and virtual reality experience of the Langbos Children’s Centre were selected by London’s Contemporary and Modern Art (CAMA) Gallery to exhibit in Los Angeles. The exhibition was titled “Art Beyond the Canvas” and explored the intersection of creativity and social impact by examining the unique construction of the Langbos Children’s Centre.
In 2019 I collaborated with the South African Youth Choir to produce promotional content for their performance at the renowned Artscape Theatre in Cape Town. Content included photo, video, and a 360 degree video of the choir’s rehearsals, as well as photo and video content of their performance at Artscape Theatre.
I was the project manager for the construction of the Langbos Children’s Centre in Langbos, Eastern Cape. This included creating and strategizing content to crowdfund over $170,000, as well as recruiting and managing a team of architects, engineers, specialists, and our local team of builders in the informal settlement of Langbos in the Eastern Cape of South Africa.
Superadobe is a simple building method that uses local soil mixed with a small amount of cement to build dome structures based on simple geometry and engineering principles. Superadobe integrates traditional earth architecture with contemporary global safety requirements and has been endorsed by the United Nations as well as awarded the prestigious Aga Khan Award for Architecture.
Using Superadobe allowed us to recruit and train an all-local team in Langbos to carry out this construction project. As a result, we were able to create jobs and skills training, provide daily nutritious meals to everyone involved, and connect with community members while giving them ownership of the project. Together, 30 Langbos residents came together for over 35,000 paid hours of collaborative work to build this unique structure.
This team of “community builders” included men and women of all ages working together to learn new skills and overcome challenges throughout the project. Aside from a competitive wage and the fulfillment of uplifting their community, they were also provided with health support and professional development, including free trips to the local clinic and workshops on CV writing. Some team members saved up their earnings during the project to purchase their own truck, which allowed them to take on and complete another paid Superadobe project to build an outdoor classroom for a nearby school. Others have also continued to stay involved with Intsikelelo projects— helping us conduct our community research, partaking in our education sponsorships, and continuing to work in various community-focused roles at the Langbos Crèche and Care Centre.
The Langbos Children’s Centre was awarded the South African Institute of Architects (SAIA) Regional Award for Architecture and is currently being considered for the national award. It was also featured as the cover story of Earthworks Magazine, and covered by ArchDaily, Design Indaba, the Daily Beast, Mawazo Africa, the Port Elizabeth Herald, and SOLE DXB.
In 2018, the Langbos Children’s Centre was the subject of the exhibition Art Beyond the Canvas at The Container Yard in downtown Los Angeles.
The Langbos Children’s Centre is a nominee for the ArchDaily 2021 Building of the Year Awards.
Learn more at intsikelelo.org/domes and https://gopro.com/en/za/news/gopro-for-a-cause-and-intsikelelo
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"A remarkable construction project has created a safe house for the community’s children and filled its adults with a renewed sense of purpose and accomplishment" - Earthworks Magazine
"Innovative shelter for Addo kids" - HeraldLIVE Port Elizabeth
"U.S. brothers build African orphanages and change the status quo for aid organizations in the process." - Daily Beast
"Helping vulnerable children through community empowerment" - Mawazo
"Unlike many foreign-founded aid organizations, Intsikelelo provides a platform that empowers local, community-driven initiatives... Everything the organization does begins and ends with the community." - GoPro for a Cause
Setswana Proverbs is a short fulldome film I made in collaboration with South African artist King Debs. It was selected to screen in the Under the Dome experimental film festival at the Iziko Planetarium in Cape Town in 2019. The Iziko Planetarium is the most advanced digital planetarium on the African continent and this festival was the first of its kind in South Africa, exploring new venues to distribute immersive content to large audiences.
From the Center for Curating the Archive:
Born out of the creators’ shared interests in technology, storytelling, and cultural expression. Grava works behind the lens, documenting the pensive movements of King Debs as he paints his cryptic calligraphy in an abandoned warehouse in an undisclosed Cape Town location. King Debs’ self-developed calligraphy expresses traditional proverbs from various Bantu and Nguni languages of South Africa. By painting traditionally oral proverbs, King Debs archives and expresses indigenous knowledge that may otherwise be lost or forgotten. In doing so, he provides his own means to bring tradition into the modern era. By documenting this with 360 degree cameras and screening the content in immersive viewing spaces, the creators combine tradition and cutting-edge technology to (re)present indigenous knowledge in new ways.
The film also screened at the 2022 Dome Fest West in Costa Mesa, California.
Dance for All is a nonprofit after-school dance program in Athlone, Cape Town.
I shot a 360 video / virtual reality piece with Dance for All as a collaborative experiment to explore choreography and viewer experience in a 360 viewing environment.
In September 2019, I was invited to display a virtual reality version of Diane Tsa Borwa (Southern Proverbs) at Gallery One11 in Cape Town.
Lubanzi Wines is a socially conscious wine brand that donates a portion of its profits to social impact projects in the Cape Winelands.
I created photo, video, and virtual and augmented reality content for Lubanzi to help communicate their brand values to consumers across the world.
I shot and edited this 360 video for Meat Naturally, a social enterprise in South Africa. Meat Naturally partners with NGOs to offer rural farmers formal training on regenerative grazing techniques, rangeland restoration practices, cattle management, stock theft patrol, and predator control.
35mm photography is a passion I have explored since 2017. I have completed coursework at the ORMS Cape Town School of Photography, and in 2018 my photos of the Langbos Children’s Shelter were exhibited by London’s Contemporary and Modern Art Gallery.
