Weta Workshop Lord of the Rings costumes. Photo / Heather Paul
Weta Workshop Lord of the Rings costumes. Photo / Heather Paul
The capital's streets, parks, museums, airport and zoo are teeming with lifelike creations from the workshop, writes Bronwyn Sell.
Growing up in small-town New Zealand, my closest brush with Hollywood was the day a replica Knight Rider car parked at the local shops.
The kids at my school contemplated careers as accountants, mill and farm workers and scientists. But a creative career - and one on the world stage? Where did you even start with that?
Not so for the millennial who took the family and me on a tour of Weta Workshop's Thunderbirds' set in Miramar. A local, she barely remembered the Wellington suburb in the days before Weta. A career there - as a painter, when she's not pulling shifts as a tour guide - seemed as natural a progression as my schoolmates picking up apprenticeships at the local mill.
My 7-year-old had been planning a question for days: "If I draw a really good monster, will you make it into a movie?"
In reply, the millennial pointed out a concept drawing pinned to a wall. It was sketched by the young son of a Weta designer, and became part of the inspiration for one of the workshop's many film and TV creations.
Granted, that kid had better connections than my son does, but the great thing about a trip to the Wellington of the Weta era is that it's so inspiring for kids (and adults) to see creative work up close in such a tactile and visible way. And not just the end result, which we can view on big and small screens, but the effort, thought and innovation behind it.
You could almost smell the sparks zapping in my son's brain as he pulled the lever to open the runway on the real Thunderbird 2 set, gazed up at the giant sculpture of Gandalf riding an eagle in the domestic airport terminal, and pored over a diorama of the Battle of Gallipoli at Te Papa.
The Weta infestation has punched its barbs into all corners of Wellington - a climbing frame at the zoo, street sculptures, huge dragons and giants and eagles and a Gollum at the airport, the art-deco retro-futurist (if that's not a thing, I'm making it one) Roxy cinema at Miramar. There are so many lifelike Weta creations that at one point my 9-year-old and I stared for a long time at a guy meditating in a park, debating whether he was for real. (He was. We think.)
Weta has also expanded into the museum industry. It worked with Te Papa's design team and scientists on the renowned Gallipoli exhibition, while Sir Peter Jackson's Great War exhibition is across town at the Dominion Museum.
Lottie Le Gallais, part of the 'Scale Of Our War' exhibition at Te Papa.
The blockbuster Gallipoli: The Scale of our War is alone worth the airfare to the big little city, with its gigantic lifelike sculptures of real people who served portrayed down to the hairs on their arms, in sometimes heartbreaking scenes. It's a well-layered exhibition, with plenty for younger kids to explore, interactive maps illustrating the timeline and geography of the campaign, and many opportunities for those with longer attention spans to dig deeper.
The Dominion exhibition has movie-like sets that walk you through the progression of World War I, a miniature recreation of the battle of Chunuk Bair, and hundreds of colourised photos.
Of course, the best place to get bitten by the Weta bug is Weta Workshop, at Miramar.
My boys are obsessive fans of the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies, so they loved poking around the Weta Cave museum and shop and reverently wielding replicas of the films' weapons.
But we found the real magic in an unassuming warehouse a few blocks away, where the miniature set for the Thunderbirds revival series is housed. Whether you're a little fan or recall the original 1960s show from your childhood, it's a fascinating doll's house nirvana, with the Tracy Island and villa, Lady Penelope's elegant mansion, the villain's lair and a miniature street.
There are cute knowing winks - Thunderbird 4's cave is modelled on Cathedral Cove on the Coromandel Peninsula, the palms are nikau, some characters wear Swanndris, and the tiny books on Lady Penelope's shelf include The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and, strangely, Twilight.
But, purists as they are, the designers have stayed true to the original concept, which incorporated everyday objects and trash into the sets, alongside 21st century technology such as 3D printing and laser cutting. There are dishwasher and washing machine parts, bottle caps, disposable razors, pens, an old CD rack (remember them?) and lemon squeezers, all painted and camouflaged just enough that it takes a while to decipher what you're looking at. The joke during set building was that if you left your drink bottle unattended it'd be part of the backdrop by the end of the day.
"We want kids to know they can go home and make their own worlds," says the millennial.
"Never get rid of anything, boys!"
Afterwards, I suggest we join the Weta Cave Workshop Tour for a behind-the-scenes look at creations from the company's blockbuster movies, plus a glimpse into the workshop, but after a day immersed in other worlds, the kids' wide-eyed heads are full. And they want food.
Of course, they don't appreciate that New Zealand hasn't always been out here on the frontier of creative innovation, that there hasn't always been a visible path to such careers. Not that it's an easy path - Weta says on its website that it employs about five to 10 people every year, of the thousands of portfolios it has on hand.
But there's an incalculable value in just sparking that interest. In the plane home from our Wellington expedition the 7-year-old starts work on his monster drawing, declaring that he's no longer going to be a palaeontologist.
