Today is Christmas Eve! I had a lazy morning, my main effort involved walking to Shelly Bay Baker to pick up a load of seeded sourdough to have with our Christmas dinner (I may have also bought a couple of cinnamon rolls…) After that I took it easy, hanging out with Rita and packing up to go to Annemarie’s later in the afternoon.
Later I met Annemarie and we took a tour of Weta Workshops, the company behind all the amazing creatures and items (like swords, there were sooooo many swords!) in Peter Jackson films, as well as many other movies. I found out that they did the makeup for Once Were Warriors, it was one of the earlier films they worked on. We learned a lot about how they make masks, prosthetic devices, even plastic chainmail that looks totally realistic, but is much, much lighter. We got to see into the different work spaces, including where they create all those cool swords, though being that it was Christmas Eve no one was actually working.
We did get a little live demonstration on how they create creatures using tinfoil as a base, then cover it with a moldable plastic and use various grades of sandpaper to finish it off. There were also several creatures made purely from tinfoil – Incredibly detailed.
After we completed that part of the tour, we walked two blocks down to one of their studios filled with displays from the movie Thunderbirds Are Go. Thunderbirds was a British 1960s action series in which the characters were played by marionettes. In 2017 they made the movie based on the series, and instead of marionettes, used CGI for the characters but kept a similar style. Apparently they had planned to use marionettes in the movie, but when they did a test with audiences of children in 2015, the kids found the marionettes to be very scary (which might be a testament to some of the horror movies that have come out in the last couple of decades!) It was fascinating to see all the miniatures and learn how it worked to make the movie. Of course the classic 60s style house and furniture was awesome to check out, complete with the sunken living room and white space age chairs. In the original TV show the character Miss Penelope always held a cigarette and a martini, but in the 2017 movie they changed it to her holding a small dog, oh how times have changed! They also added in a new character, a woman of color, something that was sorely missing in the original TV series.
The gift shop and mini museum areas had all kinds of neat stuff, though I am shocked by the prices people are willing to pay for collectibles! I learned that Weta Workshop has helped make prosthetic devices for real life situations, such as a kiwi bird at the zoo that had lost a foot in a trap, as well as a fake orca whale teat for a baby orca whale that got separated from its mother and was not feeding.
We ended the day by wrapping Christmas presents, then watched A Muppet Christmas Carol (another holiday staple in our family) with dinner of yummy crispy fish and homemade garlic pull apart rolls (Annemarie does them well!) Finally we headed to bed with visions of sugarplums dancing in our heads (ok, maybe more like visions of fresh scones for breakfast!)