Shane Vermooten was just a schoolboy, with dreams of becoming an architect, when his dad popped in to see the principal one day. It wasn’t because Shane was in trouble, even if his maths and drawing skills were nowhere near good enough for him to realise his dream.
Instead, Shane’s dad, who ran a film production company, wanted to take his son out of school and set him on course for a different kind of career, in the exciting but demanding realm where ideas get turned into stories that can move the world. It worked.
Today, Shane is an award-winning commercial and movie director whose debut feature, a horror tale called “Bypass”, quite literally stole hearts and changed minds.
Shane sat down for a Zoom session with Ruda Landman, to talk about his love of storytelling, his unusual upbringing, and his thoughts on why it’s sometimes better for your childhood dreams not to come true.
Transcription of Ruda Talks Change with Shane Vermooten
Ruda Landman (RL): Hello, and a warm welcome to another session of Ruda Talks Change on the Change Exchange. We’re in a slightly different format. This virus makes everything slightly different, but it also makes it possible to reach an audience that we may not otherwise have done. So it’s quite exciting as well. And my guest I’m so looking forward to this interview, because as I started looking into Shane Vermooton’s background and history and whatever, I just thought this is going to be such an interesting conversation, Shane Vermooton, welcome.
Shane Vermooton (SV): Thank you so much for having me, Ruda, I hope to live up to your expectations.
RL: You already have with the films you’ve made. He’s a film director. Do you also do ads?
SV: Um, yeah, so I’ve done some smaller commercials, but mainly longer form stuff.
RL: Yes. How did this start? Where did you grow up? What were your dreams? Did you ever think of this when you were a child?
SV: So, um, I grew up in Muizenberg, so I’ve lived my whole life in Cape town. And I was thinking about this and I think there’s one instance I can remember growing up and I thought I wanted to be an architect. Um, but then my drawings are hopeless. I cannot, and my maths is even worse. Luckily, that idea of wanting to be an architect didn’t live very long. Um, but besides that, the only thing I’ve ever wanted to be, I can remember even wanting to be was a filmmaker. Um, so it’s just, it’s been in my blood. My parents ran a production company and so growing up I’d either go to set with them or, um, would travel and, you know, they would do overseas jobs and I would go with, I mean, but now I look back and it seems like it was probably just free labour. Um, but it was amazing for me to, at that age, growing up to, to be on set, to see how things work. And I remember one instance when on a trip and it was basically going to be the whole of the fourth term and I’d come back like a week before the fourth term holidays. Um, and my dad went to the principal and said, Hey, I’m asking you if my, you know, to, to take Shane out of school. And the principal said, no, you can’t. So my dad said, well, let me rephrase. I’m not asking you. Um, I’m telling you that I’m taking him out.
RL: How old were you? Which, which grade?
SV: Oh, it must’ve been in grade five or grade six as a result of that, we got to, I mean, by the time I’d finished school, I’d seen more than 15 countries, now I’ve shot and filmed in 21 countries around the world. Um, and I think it was just growing up with that, with that worldview was amazing and it shaped me in such a big way.
RL: And was it always the directors chair? Well directors, doesn’t usually sit down and in my experience, but the director’s role that drew you? You, you didn’t want to also write scripts, huh?
SV: Yeah. So it also, write. I’m actually started out as an editor the first, uh, three, four years I was editing. Um, and I mean, I enjoyed that. I think it helps for directors. Obviously. I understand how stories put together, but I realized this wasn’t, you know, not my personality because you’re, um, you know, everyone else goes on these amazing trips and experiences, these cool things, and you’re sitting in a dark room and you get all the footage and you just like, I want to be there. Um, so I still edit some of my own stuff.
RL: And why did they shoot this shot like this? Because I cannot cut it.
SV: Um, so then I think my, my personality started coming through. And I remember a story my parents used to tell when we were younger and a bunch of the older kids would play, I must have been four or five and a bunch of the older kids were outside playing in the trees. And they would just hear this voice shouting outside, you climb there and you climb to that branch. I think it’s just always been part of my personality.
RL: Was that, did you grow up in Media Village? The company?
SV: Yes.
RL: And tell me about that. They do courses and train people and all kinds of other things apart from making films.
SV: So I grew up yeah, Media Village, as you said. And the company has two parts, they have a training part and then they have a production company. So, um, when I finished school, actually I did my training with them. And then I trained in film and I trained in photography. They ran 3 months courses very short. You get the basics and then, you know, the idea is you got, got and work. So that’s, that’s where I started. Um,
RL: And what was the first directing gig, was it Thula Thula? Or was there something before that?
SV: So I have a funny story, actually, I suppose the first thing substantial kind of thing, I can remember on my journey is there was I just finished studying and, um, a friend came to me and said: “Hey, there’s this competition for Yogi Sip, you know the yogurt drink and you got to make an advert for them and you upload it to their website. And then, if you win, you win a R100 000,”. So, I was like, well, that’s awesome. So we decided we’re going do it, we were actually looking for money because we wanted to make a public service announcement about sex trafficking, for the, the Soccer World Cup, but we didn’t have any money. And so we thought we’d look, let’s make an advert for Yogi Sip.
And if we win, we’ll take that money and we’ll make this public service announcement for the world cup. So I mean, I’m enthusiastic. So we went for it with the guys, we were going to do it, but we didn’t read the guideline instructions so well, and it turns out it’s one of these voting competitions.
RL: Oh dear!
SV: “Would you please vote, please vote,” and so we thought, no, no, our plan was what we’ll do it the last week. We’ll just buy like a thousand Yogi Sips and we’ll vote for ourselves. Cause you had to buy them cut off, like inside the lid, there was a code you’d have to SMS. And so we’re like, well buy a thousand and in the last week and we’ll win the a R100 000 after the first week, one of the teams had already a thousand votes that was not going to work. So we basically came up with a new strategy and that strategy was every weekend would go to different churches in the city and say like, this is what we want to do with human trafficking.
We wanted to make this commercial, what can you do? Well, you can buy a Yogi Sip. Um, and we found out that people weren’t voting cause it was complicated. So basically this for five months, this is what our Saturday and Sunday was. On Saturday we’d go to the shop, but because it’s a yogurt drink, like, you know, they carry limited stock. So we’d go to Makro and just fill our trolley and you’d go to the Pick n Pay and fill your trolley. And people were like, really like Yogi. So, we would cut them open the packaging, write all the codes down in a book and then repackage them on a Sunday would go to like four or five church services and sell these yogurt drinks. We ended up selling 11 000 Yoga Sips.
RL: ‘chuckles’
SV: So I probably should have shares in the company. And then that gave us the money to, to make this human trafficking commercial, which ultimately, commercial or rather PSA, which got seen by a couple million people over that time. And that ended up spring boarding my career and went from one thing to another. Um, and then further down the line, I started getting into short films.
RL: So money is always such a huge problem for film makers. It is always the biggest, you can come up with the most amazing ideas and you can put them together, but finding the funding is a huge hassle. How did you, if you had to advise another young person like yourself who wanted to start out, what would you say?
SV: I mean, I would say when people asked me that was just more, how do you become a director? Because you know, I don’t have the money and I don’t have this. And so I say, well, like the story I just told you, well, we started with selling Yoga Sips. So like, what do you have in your hands it’s a Yoga Sip? So the sell yoga. So I want to shoot on this camera, shoot on your iPhone. I don’t have an iPhone, well borrow an iPhone. Like what do you have and start making it. Um, and I think that’s how we kind of started out.
RL: That’s often the answer one gets from entrepreneurs is look to what you have, not what you’re dreaming, start, where you are. The very interesting thing about your story is, I mean your life story and the Yoga Sip story is the way you think out of the box, when you did Bypass, which is this heart wrenching movie about organ donation and the traffic in organs. Uh, you went out on the streets and just created this huge awareness around it. And you were quite daring in your social media advertising. Tell me that story?
SV: So when we made… I mean, like you said, I think for a lot of entrepreneurs, that’s where you start, what is the problem? And I think a lot of the filmmaking that I do, I come at it with that same kind of mindset. What is the problem? And when we looked at the problem, when we made the movie Bypass, it’s a medical thriller. And we definitely didn’t want it… we could make another documentary, but really people only rarely watch documentaries if it’s crazy award-winning or they interested in the topic. So like how do we, um, you know, make something people want to see. And so we created this, this medical thriller, which is supposed to just be very entertaining and then bring up more questions if you’re interested. And so the issue we looked at as well, when we looked at the issue of organ trafficking, we’re like of all the forms of organ trafficking or all the forms of human trafficking, sorry, I meant organ trafficking is the kind of the easiest one to solve, because you know, sex trafficking, it’s very complicated and labour trafficking, there’s so many levels. Now organ trafficking is also complicated, but on the surface level, there’s a need for a black market because there’s not enough legal organs. And in South Africa at that time, it was 0.02% of our population, depending on who you ask that might’ve gone up to 3% of our population were donors. So we said, well, let’s use this film Bypass, and market it in such a way that we can then encourage people to sign up, to become organ donors. So it was a two part campaign and the first part was in the film, our character goes away to a clinic where she gets these illegal organs. And so we, and that clinic is called the New Day Clinic. So we said, great, let’s create the New Day Clinic for real. And so we set up a website and on there it was prices of organs that you can actually buy. And it was supposed to be very inflammatory. Like the opening line said: “Why should you suffer poor health, when the poor can be used to suffer for you?” And people were mad about that line. I was like, the truth is people with means aren’t the ones who are selling their organs. It’s people who are poor and are vulnerable. So let’s be honest with the issue. Let’s not sugar-coat it. So we, um, we, we made this website and we handed out 200 flyers. We made them in Microsoft word with cut art, cut them skew, you know, like there’s flyers, you have on the side of the road for all those kind of weird medical procedures
RL: “Lost lover”
SV: Yeah. ‘Lost lover’ that kind of stuff. This thing exploded. Before we did the campaign, my dad was like: “Hey, maybe you should speak to a lawyer about this,” I was like: “I didn’t need to speak to a lawyer, what’s going to happen?” The next day it was on like the, the newspaper billboard headings, like on the side of the newspaper, “Organs for sale on the streets of Cape town”. And within 10 days, it had 35 000 hits on the website and every state in America and every province in South Africa had visited this website. And so when I saw how big it’s getting, I thought I was having a heart attack. I phoned my dad and I was like: “Can we speak to that lawyer friend of yours? And he’s like: “Look, it’s not illegal. It’s maybe frowned upon”. So I was like great, we’ll keep going. That campaign ended up in… once we revealed that it was a hoax and was leading to an upcoming show. And we revealed that this is actually, uh, this is what it’s for, but the reality is whether this may have made some people mad around the world. The reality is we need legal organs in South Africa. And the next week they saw a 40% spike in people signing up to become organ donors from week on week growth. So that was quite nice!
RL: That is such an amazing achievement, but the other thing that struck me and we only have half an hour, so I can’t go into everything. But, um, what struck me is that you put your head down and you make things happen. You had lottery money for Bypass, it needed to be spent in the same year. So you made this film in a year. Previously, you had the Thula Thula one, which is the 168 festival, it’s such an interesting concept. One six, eight, 168 hours is seven days. So you have to make this thing in seven days. Um, how do you go about that? You put your whole team together, you must structure it to the ends degree. And then on day one, four o’clock in the morning, everyone’s there.
SV: Yeah. I mean, yeah. So kind of taking what you’ve learned from a traditional filmmaking when, you know, and when you’re not comfortable compacting all into one week. And like you say, just compacted down into one week. So it’s all planned and down to the tee. You’ve obviously written the script. So you can write the script before that one week. Um, so you’ve written the script and then you’ve got one week to make it, and these time challenges are so fun because often you find some of the best creative ideas come. When you, when you kind of throw off the shackles, you like, ah, I’m not, I don’t have investor. I don’t have producers. I have to please, uh, we’ve got one week and we’ve got people who are passionate to make something, so let’s do it. Um, and so that’s why I like doing those time competitions. Cause sometimes, you know, when you get into your head too much on working on a script, you can work on it for four months and years and never release it. And I think there’s time for them to just say, well, you’ve got a week what can you do. Um, and then,
RL: And the shots can take an hour or three days depending on what you have. So if you have an hour, you do it in an hour. Tell me about the 2015 Mandela Washington Fellowship for Young African leaders. How did you experience that? And did it shift something in you?
SV: Yeah. The Washington fellowship was Obama’s kind of flagship African program, that he set up while he was in office and has this amazing program that took 500 leaders from across the African continent in civic leadership, entrepreneurship, and then non-profits. Um, so 500 from the whole continent. And you went to the U.S spread across universities across the U.S for six weeks. And then the seventh week, you went to Washington where you had conferences and then you actually met Obama and he spoke to us. It was incredible. And I think that the biggest thing I took away from that was, uh, the connections that you make, the networks because you’re now meeting with your friend, who is working in government and your other friend, who heads up this non-profit and just the scope and the way it opened your eyes to different perspectives is incredible. Yeah.
RL: Have you, have you linked up with some of those people off afterward and to get things done?
SV: Yeah. So the Cape town cohort from that year, we are still pretty tight. Um, some of them have moved to Joburg, but yeah, we still always chat about ideas all the time and have a WhatsApp group and go back and forth. Um, so that’s, I think for me, that was the biggest thing. I think once you’ve, you know, if you’ve gotten to that programme, you’ve done something pretty substantial, really. So there’s almost an air of like, there’s only so much … I think sometimes South Africans or Africans were like: “Oh America, they’re amazing. They’re gonna be able to teach us so much,”
And I think when you get there, you realise no like everyone got here on merit and we can take some stuff from them, but what they do is not always better than what we do just because it’s America doing it. Um, so I think that experience was incredible, but the, the most amazing part was just the networks you’ve got to walk away with.
RL: Are you a planner in general? I mean, apart from when you have to make something happen in seven days, do you have a path set out for yourself or do you just take the next opportunity?
SV: No, I mean, we both, me and my wife were chatting about this and we don’t, we don’t have a plan. We don’t have a five or 10 year plan. Um, we kind of, we don’t really know what’s happening next week, but we just, we just like to say yes to the opportunities that come up. Um, and we like to keep, keep pushing ourselves. So for example, now August we off to Oxford for a year.
RL: What are you going to do?
SV: Um, Bianca, my wife, she’s going to go do an MBA. And so, yeah, so I’m going along and even that, you know, that was the longest thing planned in advance and, uh, it’s, it’s happened and then Corona happened and for there was a stage where like we were like we don’t know if we’re going to be able to go and we’re like, see, this is why we don’t plan in advance because this happens. So we can, we’re going to be there for the next year. And I think that’s like we know where we want to get to, but we don’t have, I’ve got a 5-year or a 10-year plan. Uh, we just like,
RL: Where do you want to get to?
SV: Well, I mean, ultimately yes, our goal is to come back to South Africa and once you’ve been there, um, and we were hoping to, we’ve got our production company at the moment, but we just looking to go get the skills from the UK in terms of, you know, different business models that we can bring over from that side and bring here to, to our productions …
RL: And make great movies for the rest of your lives.
SV: Yeah and that’s an idea. And I think there’s lots of people who had that, who had that goal, but the, a lot of it is not backed up by sound business models. And at the end of the day, it’s gotta be a business. So part of us, um, and part of Bianca going over this, we’ll try to figure out, you know, sustainable business models for how do we make films sustainable in South Africa that also empower the crews that we work with. The film industry is actually, um, you know, kind of almost across the board is very much a, the salary is a very middle-class kind of salaries, you know? Um, but to take that step, to get into middle class, it’s a big jump, you know, to the house to get the car to move. So we, so the systems we want to set up is how do we help guys? Like, yes, they got jobs, but how do we help them like move up that ladder? And obviously that means the company has to be sustainable and profitable in order to do that. So that’s kind of a long-term vision and setting up a company.
RL: Also, it’s also focusing on, on almost on life skills training, um, which is something that fascinates me. But, uh, I’ll talk to you off camera about that. You tell me about you and Bianca, how did, how did she become part of the team and when did you know that she was more than a colleague?
SV: So we actually, we started working together after we got married, well, after we started dating, but, uh, Bianca has always been around, in fact at our wedding, we had a photograph of our parents together at her parents’ wedding. Um, so some people call it an arranged marriage. Yeah. Luckily growing up, you know, Cape town, you don’t drive further then 10 minutes and say, it’s far. So I lived in Southern suburbs and she lived in the Northern suburbs, so we didn’t see each other much growing up. Um, and then one time I went to her house, um, with my mom to drop something off. And then we saw each other and I was like, Oh, hello. And then just every day since we started hanging out and then, then yeah, then it happened. Um, and then since then we, obviously we worked together. So, Bianca works as a producer on the projects. And, and it’s just, it’s been amazing. I mean, I can’t recommend it for everyone. But I think working with my partner, we’ve been able to travel. We’ve been able to see the world. Um, and we’re talking about the same. Why is it that for some people they can’t work together and want to kill each other and for some people they’re happily married, they love each other, but they just can’t work together. And how, like, how does this work for us? And we were saying like, we think it’s because like we have, you know, we’ve got the same almost objectives in that we, we know that like this is what we want to do with our lives. And we kind of on the same path. So occasionally we may disagree, but we like, so one of the vows, for example, we made to each other when we got married is that we’ll always prioritise, experiences over the things, which sounds like a nice romantic thing that you know, you’re going to see on Pinterest or something. Um, but like, we’ve really stuck to that. So, you know, even our house, our tables in our house, we are made from, you know, refurbished pallets that we used on our wedding day for decoration, because our intent was like, we want to take, we want to spend most of our money and our resources on experiences between the two of us. So traveling, working, making content, um, and for us, that’s, that’s been incredible.
RL: And, you know, I looked at that wedding video of yours and it’s absolutely gorgeous. Um, and I was thinking, I am very proud of the fact that I’ve been married for 43 years, but so many marriages, um, end in divorce. How will you make it, what will cement it when, through the difficult times, what is it that will keep you together?
SV: I think it’s, I mean, a couple of things, I’m always hesitant cause you know, we’ve only been married five years now, so I’m not gonna be like, Oh, look at this guy. I think he’s an expert on, on marriage. But I think it’s like, first of all, I like our commitment to one another. Like we both totally committed to one another, but then I think it’s also that, like our priorities are the same.
RL: Your values, you call it priorities, but it’s also what do you, what do you see as important, the values inside?
SV: And for us, we’re very intentional about that. You know what, at this point in our lives, do we value it and, and, and that may move and that may change. Um, but we’ll always prioritise each other and always make time for each other. I think the other thing too, is we very serious about issues about certain issues, but we don’t take life very seriously. So we laugh at each other a lot, but we just, we’re always laughing. Um, and so it’s becomes difficult to actually argue a fight because he was laughing at me. Um, but so when it comes to the small issues, we just don’t sweat the small things. Um, and we rather keep that, you know, um, for, for the big, for the big issues,
RL: A colleague of mine, uh, older colleague, Dennis Beckett said to me, once, that’s the answer to, you know, to keep a marriage together is never to look for solutions outside of the marriage. It’s such an interesting idea that, uh, you find it, you find that the answer to your problem within the relationship, you don’t try and see what I could, I could be on my own and do X, Y, Z.
SV: And I think that’s, I mean, for us, I mean, even working together it’s so I think we lean on each other so much. I’m stuck with the creative problem and I don’t know, does this look good? Is it working? And I can have 10 people in the room and everyone’s saying, yes, no. And I don’t know. And all I need to do is look at her and say like, is this working? And if she says, it’s working, I’m like, I’m comfortable. That’s waking because, um, and, and, and the other way around it, it works both ways. So, I think that finding that comfort in each other helps.
RL: You’ve said that you make you personal space as simple and cost-effective as possible and when you travelling how do you retain a sense of being anchored? Because it can get very deurmekaar, when one is on the road constantly?
SV: Well we just live in an apartment and, so let’s just lock up and go. And after I finished school, before I studied, I went to the States for 6 months and did a programme there and it was 2 months in the US and 2 months in Israel and back to the US for a month. The programme was amazing and amazing spiritual and personal growth. But what I found, was that you basically get this time to reinvent yourself. And so that stage of my life I decided that I need to change, I need to find people that are going to inspire, and encourage and push me, to kind do and be more. So I made that change. The nice thing about being married and working together is that we travel a lot and it’s not like she’s here and I am away. Now with us going to Oxford, it definitely feels like another push on to the next level. We’re literally selling everything we have and the only thing we’re keeping is our bed because good beds are hard to find. And we are moving over because we feel, like this is now a new time, a new level and part of that is being uncomfortable and not really sure where home is. But we know that we are together, so that the key. And uprooting our entire lives and finding new friends. It’d definitely going to be a challenging time.
RL: What is the first thing you look for in a friend because you are quite intentional about it? It isn’t the first guy you run into in a pub.
SV: First thing is don’t find them in a pub. For me it a group of many different things, you have friends you can just got to and just chill. And you have friends where you can go to them for deep conversation. But for me and drives some people crazy, I read a lot especially about what is happening around me. I like to be up to date with that kind of stuff, and I like to discuss that stuff and unpack it and talk about it. I believe that someone who us thinking should be able to a conversation Ruda and say, “I am right and you’re wrong” and you speak to and I’m like actually Ruda is right, and I am wrong and you change. And for a lot of people that frustrates them, because “you don’t stick to anything”. But yeah, my thinking on things evolve. So I like to have those kinds of friendships.
RL: Shane thank you very much, it was an easy, and happy a conversation, and an insightful conversation, as I thought it would be. All best in Oxford and I hope you learn everything you need to learn and bring back to our beautiful Cape Town.
SV: Yeah, it’s going to be great its going to be cold and we’re leaving in August and before we’re go, we are squeezing in another short film. So we’ve got a lot to do before we go but I know it’s going to be an amazing trip.
RL: And thank you for downloading and watching it wherever you are. And do go to YouTube and look at Shane’s short films, they are amazing. Thula Thula for me Shane was just absolutely beautiful, so thank you for that! Go well and until next time.
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