Privacy
Policy.

Essential Stunts & Special Effects (“Essential”, “we”, “us”) is a special effects and stunts company based in Cape Town, South Africa, founded and run by Paul Pieterse. We operate this website at paulpieterse.com.

For the purposes of POPIA we are the responsible party for the personal information described in this policy. That means we decide why and how it is processed, and we are accountable for it.

Information Officer

Paul Pieterse is our Information Officer. Any question, request or complaint about personal information should go to him:

• Email: essentialsfx@paulpieterse.com
• Telephone: +27 82 694 4562
• Based in Cape Town, South Africa

This policy applies to personal information we process when:

• you visit paulpieterse.com;
• you send us an enquiry through the form on our contact page;
• you correspond with us by email or telephone; and
• you, or the production you work for, engage us on a job.

It does not apply to other people’s websites. Where we link out — for example to Paul’s IMDb profile — that site has its own privacy policy and we have no control over it. Following such a link is a decision to leave our site.

Information you give us through the form

The enquiry form on our contact page asks for the following. Only the first, second and last are required:

• your name;
• your email address;
• your production company, if you give one;
• your telephone number, if you give one;
• the type of production — feature film, TV series, commercial, stills or other; and
• your message.

The message field is free text. Whatever you choose to put in it becomes information we hold, so please do not include anything sensitive that we have not asked for.

Information you give us by email or phone

If you email us, we hold the message and any attachments, together with the sending and receiving addresses, the subject line and the time it was sent. Our replies are held in the same way, so a conversation stays readable as a conversation. If you telephone us, we hold whatever you tell us and the number you called from. We do not record calls.

Information that arises from working together

If we are engaged on a production, we will hold the contact details and roles of the people we deal with — production staff, crew and performers — along with the documents needed to plan and carry out the work safely, and the records needed to invoice for it and account for it afterwards.

Information collected automatically

Our host records technical details of requests made to this site: the IP address the request came from, the browser and device it identifies itself as, the page requested, and the time. This is standard server logging, and we use it only to keep the site running and to investigate faults and abuse. We do not use it to build a profile of you.

Almost everything we hold comes directly from you, because you chose to contact us or to work with us. We do not buy contact lists, and we do not scrape them.

Occasionally information reaches us from someone else — a production manager passing on a crew member’s number, or an agent introducing a client. Where that happens, the information is limited to what is needed to do the job. If you would rather we did not hold it, tell us and we will deal with it under your rights.

POPIA requires us to have a lawful basis for everything we do with your information. Ours are these:

To answer your enquiry

We process what you send us so that we can reply, quote, and discuss the work. Our basis is your consent: you chose to send it, and you can withdraw that consent at any time.

To do the work

If you engage us, we process what is needed to plan, staff, cost and safely execute the job. Our basis is that the processing is necessary to conclude or perform a contract with you.

To run our business

We keep records of enquiries and correspondence, maintain the security of this site, and keep the accounts. Our basis is our legitimate interest in operating and defending the business. We have considered your interests against ours, and we limit this to what a person contacting a company would reasonably expect.

To meet legal obligations

Tax, company and occupational health and safety law require us to create and keep certain records. Our basis is compliance with an obligation imposed by law.

Giving us your personal information is voluntary. Nothing obliges you to fill in the form or to send us an email.

But the form cannot be submitted without a name, an email address and a message, for the simple reason that we cannot answer an enquiry that does not say who it is from or what it is about. If you would rather not use the form, telephone us instead.

Once we are engaged on a job, some information becomes unavoidable: we cannot plan a stunt or a pyrotechnic effect safely, or insure it, without knowing who is involved and what they are being asked to do.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for anyone else’s marketing.

We do use a small number of service providers to run the site and our mailbox. Under POPIA these are operators: they process information on our instruction and for no purpose of their own, under contracts that require them to keep it confidential and secure.

Beyond those, we may share information:

• with a production, studio, insurer or fellow contractor, where doing so is part of delivering the job you engaged us for;
• with our accountants, auditors and legal advisers, who are bound by their own duties of confidence;
• where the law requires it, or where a court, regulator or investigating authority validly demands it; and
• where it is necessary to establish, exercise or defend a legal claim.

The providers listed above are based in the United States, and the information they hold for us is stored on servers there. That is a transborder flow of personal information under section 72 of POPIA, so it is worth being plain about it.

We rely on the fact that each provider is bound by a contract with us that imposes conditions substantially similar to the information-processing conditions POPIA sets, and that requires equivalent protection where information is passed on again. Where a transfer is instead necessary to perform a contract with you — sending you an email is, quite literally, a transfer — we rely on that.

Email is by its nature international. A message you send us may cross several countries before it arrives, and we have no control over the route it takes. If a matter is confidential enough that this concerns you, telephone us.

The public pages of this site set no cookies at all. There is no consent banner because there is nothing to consent to.

We run no analytics, no advertising pixels and no third-party tracking of any kind. We do not know how many people visit this site beyond what our host’s server logs show, and we have accepted that as the price of not watching you.

The typefaces are served from our own domain rather than fetched from a font service, so loading a page does not announce your visit to a third party. Videos on this site are served from our own storage and are not embedded from a video platform.

Our private admin area, which only we can reach, uses strictly necessary cookies to keep us signed in. These are never set on the pages you can see.

POPIA does not allow us to keep personal information for longer than we need it. Our periods are these:

• Enquiries that do not become work — kept for two years from our last contact, because a production that falls through often comes back.
• Correspondence and records relating to a job — kept for five years after the job ends, which is the period in which a dispute or claim about the work realistically arises.
• Accounting and tax records — kept for as long as tax and company law require, generally five years and in some cases seven.
• Health and safety records for a production — kept for the period the applicable safety legislation requires.
• Server logs — kept by our host for a short rolling window, typically about thirty days.

When a period ends we delete the information or de-identify it. If you ask us to delete something sooner we will, unless we are required to keep it — in which case we will tell you which obligation applies and for how long.

We are required to secure the integrity and confidentiality of your information by taking reasonable technical and organisational measures. In practice:

• the whole site is served over an encrypted connection, and information you submit is encrypted in transit;
• our mailbox and its records sit behind authentication, and only we can reach them;
• the automated feed that delivers incoming mail is cryptographically signed, and an unsigned or wrongly signed request is rejected before it reaches our records;
• credentials and keys are held in server-side configuration, never in the website's code or in anything sent to your browser;
• our providers are chosen partly for the security they can demonstrate, and are contractually bound to it; and
• access is limited to the people who need it, which is a short list.

No system is perfectly secure, and we will not pretend otherwise. If personal information is accessed or acquired by an unauthorised person, POPIA requires us to notify the Information Regulator and you as soon as reasonably possible, and we will — telling you what happened, what it means for you, and what we recommend you do.

POPIA gives you the following rights over the information we hold about you. They are free to exercise, and using them will not affect how we deal with you.

• To be told what we hold — you may ask us to confirm, free of charge, whether we hold information about you, and to be given a description of it.
• To a copy of it — you may request the information itself. We may charge the prescribed fee for this, and will tell you the amount before we start.
• To correct or delete it — you may ask us to correct information that is inaccurate, irrelevant, excessive, out of date, incomplete, misleading or unlawfully obtained, or to delete it.
• To object — where we rely on legitimate interests, you may object to the processing on reasonable grounds, and we must stop unless the law says otherwise.
• To withdraw consent — where we rely on your consent, you may withdraw it at any time. That does not undo processing already carried out lawfully.
• To refuse direct marketing — you may tell us not to market to you, in any form, at any time.
• Not to be subject to a decision made purely by a machine — see section 16.
• To complain — to us, or directly to the Information Regulator.

Email essentialsfx@paulpieterse.com and say what you want. Plain language is fine — you do not need to cite a section of the Act, and we would rather deal with a clear sentence than a formal notice.

A formal request for access to information is made on the form prescribed under POPIA, and we will send you the form and help you complete it if that is the route you want. For anything simpler — a correction, a deletion, an objection — an email is enough.

We will ask you to prove who you are before we hand over or change anything, because the alternative is handing your information to someone who claims to be you. We will respond as soon as reasonably possible, and within the periods the Act allows. If we refuse a request, we will tell you why and what you can do about it.

We do not run a mailing list and we do not send marketing emails or messages. If you hear from us, it is because you contacted us or we are working together.

POPIA only permits electronic direct marketing to someone who is not already our customer if they have consented, and it allows a single request for that consent. If we ever start marketing, we will ask first, we will make the opt-out obvious in every message, and we will honour it immediately.

Special personal information

POPIA gives extra protection to information about health, race, religion, trade union membership, political persuasion, sex life, biometrics and criminal behaviour. We do not ask for any of it through this website.

Stunt and pyrotechnic work occasionally requires health-related information — a performer’s fitness for a particular gag, or what an insurer or safety officer needs to sign it off. Where that arises we process it only with the person’s consent or where the Act otherwise permits it, we limit it to those who must see it, and we delete it when the production is over and the applicable retention period has run.

Children

This site is aimed at production professionals and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect information about anyone under 18 through it. If you believe a child has sent us information, tell us and we will delete it.

Where a production involves a performer under 18, POPIA treats their information as requiring the consent of a competent person — normally a parent or guardian — and we handle it on that footing.

We do not make decisions about you by automated means, and nothing on this site profiles you. Every decision about an enquiry, a quote or a booking is made by a person.

We will update this policy when what we do changes — a new provider, a new purpose, a change in the law. The date at the top tells you when it last changed.

If a change materially affects how we handle information we already hold about you, we will not rely on you noticing a date. We will tell you.

Please raise it with us first. Most complaints come from a misunderstanding we can clear up quickly, and we would rather fix something than have you carry it. Email essentialsfx@paulpieterse.com.

You do not have to come to us first, and you can go to the regulator at any time — including if you are unhappy with how we handled it.