Special effects genius adds to movie's magic appeal

By DITA DE BONI

Tempestuous Wellington, awash with rain just one week ago, has calmed. The skies have cleared and the sun is shining. It is a welcome reprieve from the vagaries of spring weather that could not have been better timed if it had come courtesy of the special effects department on a Peter Jackson movie.

But of course, this is a Peter Jackson movie. In the slightly shabby ex-Army barracks that comprise Camperdown Studios in Miramar, the unique vision of Jackson's chosen tales - and others in between times - are brought to life with the precision and passion of artists dedicated to the surreal and fantastic.

The creatures and creations of the much-hyped The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Jackson's most ambitious project to date, are the latest to find their form in these unassuming barracks, crafted for the screen by the artists' hands from a dizzying array of raw materials that other people might scarcely know what to do with.

The artists at Weta - so named by its founders because the insects are the "coolest little monsters in the world" - have produced a total of 48,000 different items for the LOTR movies in a painstaking recreation of J.R.R. Tolkien's imaginary world. Among these are 1200 suits of armour, 2000 weapons and 1600 pairs of hobbit feet.

The buck for this huge endeavour stops with Richard Taylor and his long-time partner, Tania Rodger, who run Weta Workshop and have worked with Jackson throughout his professional ascent.

They have brought every strange permutation of his artistic vision to life. They threw buckets of fake blood and gore around the room in Brain Dead and breathed life into teenage girls' plasticine fantasies in Heavenly Creatures.

They are now responsible for bringing Tolkien's Orcs, Uruk-hais and all manner of creaturedom, armoury, heraldry and miscellanea to life for LOTR, the upcoming premiere of which promises to shatter their famously low-profile business with an avalanche of global interest.

Taylor, aged 36, is absurdly modest and almost matter-of-fact about it all, despite his obvious excitement about the first film's imminent release. Tall and John Lennon-esque (complete with a slight English lilt), he is a friendly oasis in the midst of an army of publicity-minders employed to beat off journalists.

He is so friendly, in fact, that he sits patiently as this reporter lets off a tirade about the odiousness of over-controlling publicity departments. He even goofs it up for the cameras good-naturedly later on. But this is perhaps his modesty at play, as only half his face can be seen when buried in a monster's armpit.

Unlike curious journalists, if Taylor has been stifled by the demands of New Line, the company backing LOTR, he's not saying. "New Line were very good in the fact that they trusted totally in Peter [Jackson]'s vision," he says.

"We rarely had to pursue their approvals, as they trusted that if Peter approved it, it was approved. And that made for a wonderful working relationship."

Jackson came to the project replete with a local industry hungry for work and some key figures with whom he had solid professional and personal relationships.

Taylor and Rodger say they have an "intuitive appreciation" of Jackson's vision.

The couple's relationship with him reaches back to the early-80s, when the fledgling director met them on the set of an insurance commercial.

Sometime later, after they worked together on Brain Dead ("a jealous mother, bitten by a rabid rat-monkey, turns into a zombie and threatens the entire neighbourhood") and Meet the Feebles ("the Muppets on acid") the relationship was cemented further.

Mainly to preserve a digital FX system used in making Heavenly Creatures, Weta Ltd was established in 1994 by Taylor, Rodger and Jackson, along with Jackson's editor Jamie Selkirk, his producer, the late Jim Booth, and digital FX specialist George Port, now based in Avondale.

It grew to become the largest special-effects facility in New Zealand and is steadfast to Wellington, despite being wooed many times by offshore interests. In appreciation, the Wellington City Council recently hailed Taylor and Rodger as "resident geniuses".

So how does one harness so many creative, artistic people into a functioning business that delivers to budget, deadline and expectations?

First, the artists must be highly imaginative and aware of deadlines, Taylor says.

In the design process, a brief will be received, either a complex and wordy one from the the client or "a scribble on a napkin - honestly, we have been briefed on napkins in the past".

The script, which will specify something like "the big googly-eyed green monster burst through the door" sends the workshop into a frenzy of conceptualising. The staff respond within days with a number of options on a single component or character.

The concepts are then pared down into a sub-group, which are chosen to be made into 3-D models, with "anywhere from one to 100 sculptures made in investigating a character".

The sculptures are painted and studied. The design or character chosen will then go through a few more mock-up stages before a final piece is constructed.

The implications of this process become apparent when Taylor casually mentions that it was followed for every element on LOTR.

Where does this breed of artist come from? Taylor says people find Weta as much as Weta finds them.

It is not coincidental that up to 80 per cent of the workshop workers have had rural backgrounds and, although he's not sure of the relevance, at times up to 80 per cent of staffers have been left-handed.

"It's just the way it happens," he says. "That unique, eclectic inventiveness that we require in our facility is found in young people who have made a lifetime of finding enjoyment in their own selves, finding inventiveness in their environment and finding entertainment in the nuts and bolts of the tractor shed or the farming areas."

Weta now operates two companies, Weta Workshop and Weta Digital. Their fortunes have waxed and waned in tandem with the local film industry.

Pacific Renaissance's Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess provided work in the form of creatures and special makeup effects outside Jackson's projects, while a portion of work on the Hollywood blockbuster Contact, starring Jodie Foster, kept Weta Digital afloat during a dry time.

The LOTR trilogy has irrevocably changed all that. Taylor says about 2500 portfolios from all around the world were sent to the workshop as hopefuls pitched for work on the world-famous project: 350 people were employed at the height of production.

The staff has since been pared back to about 40, but the workshop continues to thrive on the contract to produce LOTR collectibles to accompany the film's release.

Rumour has it that Weta wowed New Line in New York with a presentation to win the collectibles business, turning the five-minute meeting it was granted into a discussion of several hours.

All Taylor will say, however, is that it is first time in merchandising history that an FX shop has gone on to make products for the film it has just serviced, a fact he is obviously proud of.

Taylor was born in Britain, but his rural background on his parents' lush South Auckland dairy farm, sculpting things from mud, led him to believe that New Zealanders' "No-8 wire mentality", combined with artistic ability, produces invaluable talents for the nation's film industry.

Hindered by dyslexia in subjects that required written ability, Taylor found his passion for "making stuff" propelled him in a different direction from the career in dentistry South Auckland's Wesley College would have had him undertake.

One of the questions Taylor still asks prospective employees is whether they enjoy "making stuff". "It's actually a serious question, as the computer invades our world and our leisure time is so preoccupied with either sport or computer games that that rare skill - creativity - that is so wonderful in childhood is being lost a little. We lament the fact that it's becoming a rarer skill to find."

Weta employees are often "surprised there is the opportunity to make a career out of what had only been frowned on up to that point" - namely, drawing monsters and fantasy contraptions, copying and modifying comicbook creatures, sci-fi environments and general bizarre stuff - and get paid for it.

"These people had seen that they had something special because they live and exist in these worlds, but because their parents or teachers had never imagined that this interest could possibly blossom into anything productive, the continuing story we hear is that they had to keep it to themselves."

Even Taylor's parents were sceptical. But when his first job on a TV commercial for Hannah's "Red Hot Summer Sale" came on TV, "I'm convinced my father would have been sitting in his La-Z-Boy in front of the tele and this God-ray of realisation came from the sky and hit him in the chair and he suddenly came to appreciate that his son possibly had a future in the arts in New Zealand".

The types of people he employs have such a singular desire to pursue art that they perhaps haven't shown a strong affinity with regular subjects, and so may be unfairly written off, academically and artistically.

Taylor knew long before his teachers that he would pursue a career in art.

"I celebrated in the 7th form that I'd never have to sit another exam in my life and, indeed, I went right through tertiary eduction without ever sitting another exam because my ability to verbalise through writing was poor."

His written language may have been poor, but a bronze sculpture made when he was around 15, which his mother displays proudly, shows a unique talent for sculpture and a precocious thematic interest - a male figure scoops the female figure off the ground, a simple but beautifully executed piece that would find a home in any of the nation's top art galleries.

As alluded to in his sculpture of some 20 years ago, Taylor continues with his belief of collectivism, a philosophy embraced at the Weta Workshop.

He is adamant that he is not singled out too much above his crew. There cannot be prima donnas. He does not raise his voice. "Weta is an insular environment where the culture must prevail and rule for all, because without the group we have nothing. Without a collective effort we have nothing, so therefore you can't have intense individualism," he says. "We celebrate individual creativity, but you can't have someone who is going to ruffle the other people to too great a degree, because stability and the ability to perform at the highest level is essential. You can't have confrontation."

The creative team for LOTR not only had New Line's but the world's expectations on their shoulders. At first, they thought they would be working on Tolkien's first novel The Hobbit, and were gobsmacked to learn the task was three times bigger.

Taylor points out that while he was "enthralled and amazed and excited" about translating LOTR to film, there were sensitivities to bear in mind.

"To a lot of people this is almost a religion. [They] already have a preconceived idea of what Middle-earth should look like because they've read the book. And your own imagination has painted this vision of Middle-earth.

"We realised early on we'd never fulfil every individual's vision, but we had to fulfil every individual's feeling of Middle-earth and to that end it allowed us a great deal of creative flexibility."

New Zealanders can only salivate at trailers at present but, by the accounts of the US critics who have already viewed the film, Jackson, Weta and their cast and crew of thousands have more than delivered on fans' expectations.

It's been an incredible journey for Taylor and Rodger, who have been together professionally and personally since he presented her with a pair of live Norwegian hooded rats when he was 15.

The pair describe meeting Peter Jackson as the seminal moment in their careers.

"We always knew we wanted to be making things and, before we met Peter, we had begun a company making puppets and miniatures and creatures and all sorts of other creative things.

"Our real appreciation of the FX industry wasn't really realised until Peter introduced us to it, and this intuitive appreciation of Peter's vision and the comfortable relationship we and the technicians at Weta have with him has made for a unique and wonderful career so far."

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Feature: Lord of the Rings