His 2024 Daytime Emmy win might not be the first award South African Production Designer Warren Gray has won, but it is his biggest so far. Callsheet caught up with Warren soon after he returned from LA, where he accepted the award for Art Direction/Set Decoration/Scenic Design for the Netflix docuseries “African Queens: Njinga”.

Executive produced and narrated by Jada Pinkett Smith, the 4-part series set in 1624, tells the story of the kingdom of Ndongo in West Central Africa (modern-day Angola) and its new queen: Njinga, the first female ruler (or “woman king”) of the region.

Other South African Daytime Emmy winners for the series were Gale Shepherd for Makeup and Design, and Casting Director Christa Schamberger, who shared the Casting award, with UK-based casting Olissa Rogers.

Warren says the award ceremony was “weird”. “You’re in a room and it’s all those stars you see on daytime TV, so I was just gobsmacked, I was in awe. I was just enjoying the moment and then the cameras were on me and they called ‘African Queens’ and it felt like a bomb went off in the room. Everybody’s looking at me and people are cheering and I was only focused on getting onto the stage safely, and then the presenter says ‘Well done, brother,’ and then I was like ‘This is real.'”

Buoyed by his win, while in the US, Warren met with director Liam O’Donnell, who’s coming to shoot in South Africa. “It will be the first time that I’m hired through my international agent to work as a production designer, which is a big thing. Because we’re usually a service country and we’re known for cheap labor. Now I am coming from the US side and getting paid my global worth.”

Warren says he hopes the Emmy will alert the local industry to the fact that they don’t have to bring in internationals. “This basically changes the game for me and a lot of locals.”

Born in Cape Town, Warren earned a bursary while studying industrial design and qualified in 2000 at Cape Peninsula University of Technology. He has since won multiple awards and has been accepted into the British Film Designers Guild in 2023. Known for his work on “Diamond Status” (2023), “Catch Me a Killer” (2023), “Pirates of Somalia” (2017), “Noem my Skollie” (2016), amongst others, Warren approached the “African Queens” world with his trademark attention to detail and love of history.

“So the scripts weren’t 100% written, we had brief outlines about the world, but the story was recorded through a couple of documents, historical documents, and also a professor. I read most of the book based on recordings and also about the cultures around the area. There’s nothing that exists because in that period of time, which is the 1600s, 1700s, the colonizers wanted to make Africa dark, and also the slave trade was starting to begin, and what they did was they killed most of them. They killed the heads of state in Africa. They killed the architects, they killed the engineers, they killed the scientists, they killed the librarians, they killed everybody that held the basis of knowledge of African people. So in order for me to figure out the tribes, I studied all the tribes on the perimeter of Angola. Why? Because that’s a natural thing for people to do. They retreat. So I started to study all those tribes, and a lot of similarities of what they had. So I ended up creating a world that was destroyed, a world that was taken away from the Angolan people, a world that doesn’t exist today. Looking at how the Zulu culture was formed, and how it was a combination of multiple tribes that also joined to form the Zulu culture, I used the knowledge of how Africans work and how the feudal system works. And that’s how I recreated the world.

“And once I recreated the world, I basically built this massive board with all the elements, and a visual storytelling book, I then pitched this book to Netflix and Pinkett Smith’s Westbrook Studios and Nutopia. They then trusted me, and they believed in me. And then for me, it’s always important as a designer, I look at the old way of shooting, I look at looking at a wide, and then the establishment, you want to see the world, and then suddenly you’re going closer, and then only afterwards you get into the drama.

“And I did that every single scene, the director trusted me, and I told her, please, this is how we need to do it, it’s the way the audiences are going to fall in love with the show, they’re going to want to, they’re going to go into that world and start believing in it, and then it’s your job to make sure that the actors put within the world, and by me creating this realistic world, the actors are ready to start to feel. I wanted to make it realistic and by doing that I think I captured exactly the true essence of what the world was going through.”

Warren says he also loves bringing the whole team on board to make the world as authentic as possible. “If I’m on a project and I commit to it, I fill up my computer with information. Why? Because I have a huge department I need to look after. And I have art directors that work for me who need to understand what I want. And the information needs to be relayed to the rest of the team. So the more information I gather and I study, the more I can explain to them what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. I will walk up to set and say, ‘Listen guys, so remember the buildings weren’t painted with brushes. So please don’t use any brushes. Paint with your hands.” And they think, why is he making us do all this extra work? And then they step back and look at what they created. And it’s like, it’s amazing. I want to inspire everyone because I’m excited. I’m still like, I can’t believe that I’m in the film industry.”

Warren also enjoys making tech work for him and sings the praises of a program called SketchUp. “I was the first person to get given the program. I did a job with Danny Glover in Mozambique. I got dropped off on an island, and they gave me the package called SketchUp. And I had to take this drawing package and figure it out. I didn’t know where to start. It’s a three-dimensional drawing package. So you go out there, you measure a building, and you draw it up in 3D. Pretty much what architects do now for presentations. And what we did was we built an entire island in 3D. And then sent it to the architect.

“We sent those drawings to New York, where Danny Glover and Mel Gibson’s company, Icon Pictures, were working on the budget. They didn’t have to fly everybody over to Mozambique. They could look at my three-dimensional drawings on a big screen. ‘Oh, cool, so we can shoot that scene over there for the church. We can shoot that over there.’ And that was me learning a new tool.

“And today, I’m not only using SketchUp, I’m using Lidar tools now, like the iPhone. It’s got this little sensor where I walk in a room, I measure it up in 3D, I take that 3D element, I throw it in my SketchUp, and I start modelling. My iPad is also a tool that I use and in the evenings I’m teaching myself new packages, like I’m learning Blender at the moment. It’s quite difficult, but I want to advance in technology.”

Warren is quick to point out that it’s not only the tech but also the team that made the show award-winning, and he acknowledged all his team members in a social media post. “I went through my whole sheet. I went through my spreadsheet. I looked through the file. I copied all those names. So that they could all share and say ‘look, I was in that Emmy award-winning show, I did this.'”

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