Attention to detail

If you are ever in New Zealand's capital Wellington, you should not miss the chance to explore one of the country's most important industries - movie making. New Zealand really is Middle Earth, and Wellington is at its epicentre. New Zealand is of course, where the classic movie trilogy Lord of the Rings was shot, and it is also where other movies including the Narnia saga and the forthcoming movie the Hobbit have originated. Weta Workshop is one of the most influential studios in movies today and provides a one stop shop for movie makers who flock there from around the world. They have been involved in the making of more than one hundred major movies. Recent films credits include the digital effects for The Adventures of Tin Tin, District 9, Master and Commander, The Lovely Bones, Avatar and King Kong.

Today I took a tour around the Miramar district, and visited Weta's showcase - the Weta Cave, adjoining the backlot of the Weta studio complex. Here and in nearby Stone Street Studios, there are rows of non-descript warehouses, some peeling paint and looking a little worse for wear. Just inside the fences lay many intriguing and mysterious discarded items, some of which may (or may not) have featured in famous scenes from the films you know and love. Frankly, in places it looks like a dumping ground. Yet behind the walls of these old buildings lies a fertile hive of imagineering. Here is where all the motion capture work was done on the movie King Kong, and here is where the infamous big screen animation of Gollum was created. Here is where the giant aliens were imagined into shape for the movie Avatar. Hundreds of very talented people work behind these doors, making miniature and 'bigature' models, digital effects, green screen rendering, costume, set and prop design, animation - you name it. If it is necessary for the making of a movie, Weta does it here. It's conceptual design and physical manufacturing capabilities are second to none and have earned them multiple awards. They employ a range of technologies, including computer controlled plasma cutters and 3D printing (additive manufacturing).

As we toured this extensive movie land, and visited the locations for some of the well known scenes of the Lord of the Rings our tour guide told us some of the secrets of how Sir Peter Jackson's masterpiece was made.

We heard that during the shooting of his epic trilogy, Director Jackson commissioned the building of a full set on the site of an abandoned military base just outside Wellington. He tasked his crew to create the village of Bree. It took the crew almost 3 months to construct the facades and sets that would be the backdrop for the dramatic arrival of the hobbits during a heavy downpour of rain. The film crew completed the Bree scenes in a single day, and then the set was demolished. In their entirety, the scenes filmed on the set take up only a few minutes on screen, but they are crucial to the story telling. Such attention to detail is a hallmark of Jackson's films, and have contributed to his raised status as one of the finest cinematographic directors of his generation. We can all learn a lot from Jackson and from the art of movie making, especially the painstaking attention to detail that is involved. How much better could learning environments be if more care was taken over the little things?

Photo taken by Ted Guise


Attention to detail by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.