Residents in Tembisa, South Africa, rioted for three consecutive nights to remove all aliens from their township, illustrating issues of discrimination and xenophobia. In 2009, Neill Blomkamp, a South African Canadian filmmaker, directed "District 9," a film that explored similar themes. The movie, which began as a short film called "Alive in Joburg," employed a unique approach to special effects that redefined the language of film. Blomkamp, who had extensive experience in the visual effects industry, wanted to make a film with VFX that no one would notice, using a faux documentary style that became a deeply cinema verite style, obscuring the fact that there were millions of dollars on screen. Blomkamp and the team at Weta Digital shot plates with actor Jason Cope wearing a data capture suit to stand in as the reference for all the prawns, but since they couldn't shoot clean plates, they painted in the background information frame by frame for every shot in the film, a process that was laborious, expensive