Cape Town and the Western Cape is the epicentre for creative industries. From film and animation to design and architecture, creative industries are booming here and creative people can find inspiration almost everywhere.
Reasons to invest
Creativity means business. The creative and cultural industries contribution to provincial GDP is higher in the Western Cape than in other provinces, contributing 2.9% to GDP. South Africa’s film industry is most concentrated in the Western Cape, and the City of Cape Town has the largest clustering of design and creative services of all metros in South Africa.
For the film industry, Cape Town is a mecca with approximately 5 000 identified City of Cape Town locations (Wesgro, 2016) and countless privately-owned locations available to shoot. It is also home to the only custom-built, world-class Hollywood style film studios in Africa - Cape Town Film Studios – where Lara Croft Tomb Raider, Black Sails, Warrior and many other films and TV Series have been filmed.
More than half of all South African gaming studios are based in Cape Town, as well as a large proportion of the country’s design and animation studios. Triggerfish, Africa’s largest animation studio, recently featured on the world’s stage when their animated feature “Revolting Rhymes” was nominated for an Oscar for Best Animated Short Film in 2018.
Cape Town is also known for its design aesthetic, and has hosted the internationally acclaimed Design Indaba since 1999. The Mother City reaffirmed its world-class design status when it was made a UNESCO Creative City of Design in 2017.
Why Cape Town and the Western Cape?
- Highly skilled workforce driven by multi-layered and world class education and training ecosystem. E.g. UCT’s D School, only three in the world (Germany, USA and Cape Town, South Africa).
- Cape Town is a UNESCO Creative City of Design (since 2017), the first (and currently the only one) in Africa.
- City of Cape Town was the World Design Capital in recent years.
- The Western Cape boasts a variety of world-class locations, studios, facilitation companies and specialised crew. This is what consistently attracts some of the world’s top filmmakers to its shores.
- Cape Town is South Africa’s high-end fashion design capital.
- The Western Cape offers an incredible lifestyle and is home to Hermanus, the only UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy in Africa.
