Day 15 - Wellington, Mt Victoria and Weta

Woke up this morning to another nice day. First stop after breakfast was the Weta Cave – The workshop / museum / souvenir shop that is owned by Weta workshop. Weta workshop is a costume, special effect, annimation and movie prop company that are based in Wellington and have worked on all of the Lord of the rings and Hobbit movies, as well as District nine, Narnia, Avatar, King Kong and other movies and TV shows. Outside the Weta cave they have sculptures of the three trolls (William, Tom and Bert) from the Hobbit, and inside they have some of the props from the movies, including scuptures of Gollum, Lurtz (The large Uruk-hai that shoots Boromir with an arrow) and Gandalf. They also have various weapons, armour and costumes from all of the movies that they have been involved with. After wandering around the shop for about an hour, we decided to book ourselves into the Weta Workshop tour – A tour of part of the workshop where the work is actually done, and an explanation of how they make their props. The tour was pretty popular and was booked out until 3:00pm, so we bought our tickets and headed back into Wellington to pass the 4 hrs until it was time for our tour.

The National Museum of New Zealand is located in Wellington and is called Te Papap Tongawara. Its a pretty good museum (voted one of the top 50 museums in the world!), so we spend a couple of hours wandering around the museum. They have a lot of interesting interactive displays and exhibits, as well as some special collections and special exhibits. The highlights of our museum trip were the “World of Wearable Art (WOW) collection, - Various costumes that have been designed as art as well as fashion, and also the the exhibit on “Awesome Forces”, an explanation of earthquakes, eruptions and other natural forces that occur.

After the Museum, we headed into Mt Victoria nation park – A park that overlooks Wellington. Apart from having some spectacular views of Wellington, Mt Victoria national park is also the location where some of the scenes of Lord of the Rings were filmed, especially a scene at the start of “The Fellowship of the Ring', where the Hobbits are on their way to Bree, and hide from one of the Black riders under a tree. It took a while to find, but armed with our location guide book and a GPS app that Mazz downloaded, we eventually found the spot. The large tree is not there, as that was a Movie prop created especially for the scene, but otherwise the location was very recognizable, and our “halflings” were able to “Get off the road”, and take shelter.

After Mt Victoria, we headed back to Weta Cave for our tour. There were about 20 people on the tour, and they described how props start of as a piece of 2D art, are then modelled in CAD in 3D, and are then made into 3D objects. Final step is painting to make the object life like. We also heard how much of the art is now created using photoshop. The Weta Workshop also employs a full time “armour manufacturer”, who makes all the weapons and armour for the movies. He is genuine craftsman, and some of his work is on display in the royal armoury in Leeds, England. Unfortunately we were not allowed to take any photos in the Weta Workshop, as many of the items that were being worked on have not been released yet, and they don't want any “spoilers” to get out, like the minature model we saw being created for a remake of the “Thunderbird series”! After the workshop tour it was back to the Weta cave for Daniel and Josh to buy a souvenir or two.

On the way back to the Hotel we drove by “Stone st studios', where a lot of the studio scenes were filmed for the Hobbit and LOTR. The studio appeared pretty quite and not much was happening inside, but the large green screen at the back of the building could be seen from the outside the building.