Neill Blomkamp’s debut feature film, District 9, has topped $111 million at the US box office, placing it in the top 20 films at the US box office this year. Strangely, it’s South African opening was less impressive. It opened in the number one position, taking over R2 million on its first weekend, but that figure is below recent releases like Transformers 2 (R8m), X-Men Origins: Wolverine (R5m), G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra (R3m) and Terminator: Salvation (R2.7m). Of course, this is still more money than most local films other than Schuster make in their entire run. The sci-fi feature was shot on the RED One camera, with additional footage on the HDCAM SR and XDCAM cameras. Attaining the mockumentary style needed some very fine footwork by Cape Town-based HDHUB, the digital post-production company who managed all the RED and editorial workflow. “We ended up with five to six hours of footage shot daily, on a variety of digital formats,” says Jacques McDonald, technical supervisor of HDHUB. “The challenge was integrating the different camera formats and getting all this information to the head editor, while taking care of the safe removal, storage, and back-up, including the sending of footage to New Zealand. We built a complete post-house with four editors on HD AVID, had eleven connected systems, and in the end pushed about 120TB of data to post.” HDHUB was pulled into the project by Kalahari Pictures, the South African representative of producer Peter Jackson’s Wingnut Films.

Watch the district 9 trailer here.

Watch Alive in Joburg short film here.