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Shesha staff hard at work (Image courtesy of Shesha).
Digital Therapy’s Nicholas Warner and Werner Grobbelaar onset of BMW Campaign Cape Town Summer 2017.
DIVERSIFYING IN A CHANGING ECONOMY This year was abysmal for many film industry suppliers thanks to the huge drop in service work for both the commercial and film sectors. We speak to two companies to find out how they’re sustaining themselves.
SHESHA: A BLEAK OUTLOOK ON THE SECTOR
A company that’s made a name for themselves feeding film crews for 12 years, Shesha Film and Event Caterers is a robust business with more than 150 in their national client base. They have served upwards of 5 500 meals a day across stills, commercials and long form productions, with a staff compliment of 350 employees in Cape Town and Johannesburg. These days, however, work is scarce and, says Founder Byron De Carvalho. There is even the possibility that Shesha will have to close its doors for good should the industry not return to its usual vigour.
“When Cape Town got quiet I set up a branch in Joburg because we weren’t getting enough work in the summer season to sustain ourselves. when I opened that branch, I managed to get a lot of the local winter work. In Cape Town we predominantly service international commercial or feature work,” he explains. “About 3 years ago there was a huge jump in local work and the industry just exploded so we set up shop in Joburg and it was great. Then the local work died down heavily last year and we had to close the Joburg branch – it was just not sustainable anymore. And that was just based on people thinking, ‘why
should we spend R2-million on a commercial when we can have social media targets?’.” He says they hit a very strange season in Cape Town this year when they went from an average of 40 shoots a month to 4 in the summer season. “We were lucky enough to hedge that with some feature work that ran through the winter and kept us going. But we found this year in winter, that we suffered a huge knock and we’ve had to look at other avenues of making money.” An example of this has been in events, where Shesha does popup work for restaurants. “One of our clients – a big wine farm – set up a kitchen and needed a caterer to run the kitchen for
winter. This was a great project for us because it kept us afloat.” Now, however, this side of the business is suffering, too. Thanks to the current state of the economy, corporates and marketers are refusing to splash out on events and entertainment. Byron says that despite diversifying, he remains bleak about the film sector. Realistically speaking, if things don’t pick up within the next six months, Shesha will be forced to close. This issue is not endemic to his company, but many of the smaller film catering businesses in the industry have closed their doors. Another option is relocating his business to another country. This is something he has