New Zealand is well known for being the filming location of the Lord of the Rings. But do you know who created all the special effects and the props for the movie? It's the Weta Workshop located in Wellington which is also the city where I live at the moment. It is considered as one of the greatest tourist attractions in town.
In April, a friend told us that she would be in Wellington for our Easter holiday and she was interested in seeing that place. At first, I was not so keen as I never was a big fan of the movie. But then I found it was very interesting to learn how each piece of work had been crafted, what materials they used and how long it took them to complete.
Unfortunately for this tour, I couldn't take many photos inside because they have copy-right protection on their content displays, except for the one above of course as they did allow for photos at the end.
The tour was scheduled at around 11am so we were there early to take a look at the gift shop. Only to find out that we booked the wrong time. We panicked because our friend's flight was in the afternoon so she couldn't wait until later. We thought we were going to miss the tour as the staff at the counter didn't know what to do. Luckily, a supervisor came and saved our day by offering us to join the tour at the same time. So we were really grateful for their help.
Entrance to Weta shop where we got our tickets
The tour consists of only five rooms and lasted for around 1.5 hours. On the first leg of the tour, we all stopped at the entrance of the exhibition to watch a short-video from the founders of Weta Workshop - Richard Taylor and Tania Rodger to tell us their story of how they started the company in 1987 from a room in their flat and their efforts to grow Weta into a group of film production and design companies that promote innovation and creativity like today.
After that, Dan - our tour guide - took us to a small room where they showcase many of the movies they worked on from around the 1980s to the latest releases. I don't know many of them except for KingKong, Peter Pan, Avatar and The Lord of the rings.
The next room held life-sized robots, swords, weapons, and a fully-functional car from video games that never made it to film. I remember it took quite a long time for them to design and build that car but for some reasons, they didn't use it.
Throughout the tour, Props like weapons, helmets, clothes are displayed. As I recall, Dan spent quite some time explaining how The Lord of the Rings helmets were made, from design through paper mold on an actor’s head to the final silicone painted ones you see in the movie or in the photo below. My head is small so our tourguide helped me to try one of the dwarf helmets on. It looked really heavy at first and I was hesitant to do so. However, as they are all made from recycled plastic, it is actually quite light.
The helmet I tried is similar with the one above but smaller - Photo credit: Viator
In the first three rooms we were told not to touch things without permission so we had to resist our desire to touch and hold stuff. In the fourth room, we get to basically touch everything. It was fun and scary at the same time when I tried to use the button to control the animatronic orc.
And for the last room, the tour guide told us that we can take as many photos as we want but to be honest, it is not that impressive compared to other rooms. But I still show you below.
After finishing our main tour, Dan took us to another workshop where they feature the latest version of the Thunderbirds which is based on the old stop-motion cartoon with the same name. Stop-motion cartoon is a method where they film the action frame by frame. This means they take one picture at a time. I have a no idea about that movie and why we were there because we didn't intend to see that part. I guess because of the incident with wrong booking time so we got this extra tour.
Here is one of the tiny places Weta built to film for the Thunderbirds movie
For those who are big fans of the Lords of the Rings, I think this is a place you should visit. I can tell the tourguides are big fans themselves so you will have many opportunities to fill your curiosity. Especially, if you are lucky, you can meet staffs working inside and they could tell you much more in details.
Some of the photos in this posts are from my friend and I have her permission to share with you. I hope you enjoy this post. Have a lovely weekend. Cheers, Dora.
Designed with Canva
