This place deserves its own post. We did other things in Auckland (see here) but this was such a cool place to visit that I didn’t want to lump it in with everything else.
Wētā Workshop is a film effects company that has worked on such movies as The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, Avatar, and much more. They create sets, props, special effects, and everything in between to create realistic monsters, amazing creatures, and lifelike beasts that make movies as amazing as they are.
Wētā Workshop Unleashed is their space to showcase their creative efforts and allow people to experience hands-on what it’s like to bring an idea to life. You walk through immersive make-believe film sets and have interactive experiences with tools of the trade.
Prior to walking through, you’re given a welcome and (humorous) safety briefing by an animatronic guard who burped and groaned his way through an introduction to the facility. He was oddly realistic despite his ogre-like appearance.
There are three movie genres that you go through: horror, fantasy, and sci-fi. It was absolutely incredible.
The horror movie was set up to walk us through a lot of prop design and showcase their ability to generate fear without a ton of CGI.
The first fake movie that we walked through was called Fauna, and was about a family that moved to a house in rural New Zealand and were warned not to cut down the natural fauna or else the monsters of the area would come after them. Like any great 80s horror movie, the family doesn’t listen.
In this section, we walked through a sort of mini haunted house that legitimately made you experience a little bit of claustrophobia. There was also a lovely ‘fantasy’ garden that we got a quick cute photo in.
We also got to be hands-on with trying to make different monsters ‘work’ – like pulling levers to make wings or heads move.
We could also dissect a monster.
The next movie was the fantasy flick – Age of the Everclan. This movie’s premise was that dinosaurs were never wiped off the planet and instead evolved into different clans that were warring with one another.
Here, we saw the design of entire kingdoms and saw how they make tiny things seem gigantic.
Within the kingdom, there was even a cave you could crawl through, complete with glowworms along the top!
They had hyper-realistic giants that would look even bigger with the right effects.
The final movie we went through was Origins, which was a movie that apparently was fully created but never released. It was a science fiction film about an alien species that came to Earth and created a giant robot to communicate with humans. This film was mostly set up to show us the final editing steps of the movie process as well as to put us on the set itself, with the giant robot.
We got some opportunities to do more hands-on stuff, and sit in (on?) the throne.
Overall, this was a super-cool place that we all thoroughly enjoyed. I’d recommend anybody who visits Auckland to go here. They also have a workshop in Wellington that is supposed to be fantastic. The entire tour was 90 minutes and could have easily lasted longer without boring us. A definite must see.
(For the record, a wētā is a giant flightless cricket endemic to New Zealand. Wētā Workshop takes their name in part because supposedly their warehouse was filled with them when they first took their space, and also because they are gloriously ugly creatures, which is what Wētā Workshop specializes in – gloriously ugly things. 🙂 )