Andrew McGibbon

"The name Big Nuz comes from Big because they are doing big things and NUZ is the license plate of one of the biggest townships in South Africa, Umlazi, situated in the south coast of Durban. Big Nuz consists of 3 guys Mandla Maphumulo aka Mampintsha, Mzi Tshomela aka Danger and Sbu Khomo aka R Mashesha." So it says on the website HERE

I had never heard of these guys when their record label 'Afrotainment' approached me to do the shoot. It turns out, that they are pretty much the biggest band in South Africa, I just fall in a different demographc so I wouldn't have heard them. It's pretty cool getting to know your country through the eys of others.

The image they were after was going to be pretty tough to achaive as one single shot, due to the fact that we ad very little time on location (only a couple of hours), we had no control over the time we shot (It needed to be a night time image but we had to shoot in the day!) and we wanted very similar light on each subject (Not really possible unless you light them all seperatly... which is what we did)

Below I have laid out the basic progression we went through to get the final image.

This first shot shows the four plates shot, including one for the car ( I actually shot a few more, lighting the car in different places but four pics work well in this demo)

 

 

The second image is the four shots put together.

 

 

 

Then we change the sky and car from blue to black.

 

 

Next comes a bunch of filters to make sun lit buildings and people look moon lit.

 

 

 And last but not least, some street lights, a bit of a doge, a bit of a burn, a little smoothing of the car door, and the image gets handed over to the design agency (BornAndBred) for the rest of the cover design.

 

 

I really hope this has been informative and interesting. If you have and questions or if compositing is something you would like to explore in your new album/advert etc, please feel free to get in touch.

 

~Andrew

 

•••UPDATE•••

And now..... The result!

There was a lot of fan fair building up to the release of these guys double disc yesterdat 24th August. (I had never heard of them seeing as I'm a white boy form the suburbs and they are hadrcore black guys form Umlazi but as far as album sales and awards, they are one of the biggest acts in South Africa)
Anyway, my wife and I went down to the pavilion for half price movies and half price sushi (we didn't actually know that everything we wanted was going to be half price!! Score!) and picked up a copy of the disc at musica.

Here are a few pics of the images we made for the band as the final product. The designers at BornAndBred did a pretty good job and even managed to get a A3 fold out poster so fans can put on their walls. It's pretty cool that thousands of screeming Kwaito fans will have my work pinned up on their bedroom wall!