Early Life and Career
Blomkamp was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. At 16, he met Sharlto Copley who had also attended Redhill High School in Johannesburg. Copley provided Blomkamp with the use of computers at his production company in order to pursue his passion and talent for 3D animation and design - in return, Blomkamp assisted Copley in creating 3D work for pitches on various projects. His family moved to Vancouver when Blomkamp was 18, where he enrolled in Vancouver Film School. In 2003, Blomkamp was hired to illustrate photo-real future aircraft for Popular Science's "Next century in Aviation" and in 2004 was hired to illustrate "The Future of the Automobile". Blomkamp worked as a visual effects artist at The Embassy Visual Effects in Vancouver as well as Rainmaker Digital Effects. Blomkamp was signed by Toronto commercial house Spy Films.
In 2007, Blomkamp directed a trilogy of live-action short films (known collectively as Landfall) set in the Halo universe, to promote the release of Halo 3. In 2008, Halo: Combat Evolved, the first of the three installments, won the Cannes Lions 2008 – Film Lions Grand Prix.
Blomkamp was then slated to direct his first feature-length film, an adaptation of the Halo series of video games, produced by Peter Jackson. Peter Jackson had come to know about Blomkamp after viewing a reel of his commercial work and shorts shot in his off time. The four shorts that got him noticed included Tetra Vaal, a faux advertisement for a third-world robotic police that established Neill Blomkamp's signature style of mixing lo-fi production with seamless CGI; Alive in Joburg, a gritty "documentary" about extraterrestrials marooned in Johannesburg; Tempbot, an Office Space-esque spoof; and Yellow, a short film based on the colour yellow for Adidas' "Adicolor" campaign, which portrays a globe-trotting android gone rogue.
When funding for the Halo film collapsed, Peter Jackson decided to produce District 9 instead, an adaptation of Blomkamp's earlier short film Alive in Joburg, which had been produced by Hansen and Copley. The film, directed by Blomkamp and starring Copley, was released in mid-August 2009, to critical acclaim.
On October 2010, a video was released on the iPad version of the Wired Magazine, credited to Neill Blomkamp, which shows an amateur recording of two young men who find a dead mutated creature in a puddle of mud while driving down a countryside road. The creature, a dog-sized mix between a pig and a lizard, presents a tattooed seal on its side that reads "18.12 AGM Heartland Pat. Pend. USA". Also, "AGM Heartland" was trademarked for its use in an entertainment-oriented website. It is yet unknown whether the video holds any relation to Blomkamp's current project, Elysium. On 20 February 2012, a 23 second video clip titled "IS IT DEAD?" appeared on YouTube, featuring Yolandi Visser, of the South African group Die Antwoord, crouching over the creature.
On April 2013, Blomkamp admitted that he is still interested in making a Halo film.
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