New Zealand: day 6 - Weta & Cuba Street

We all got a decent night's sleep last night and woke to find that our windows opened up onto beautiful Oriental Bay here in Wellington. The sun was shining, people were walking their dogs, swimming in the bay, and generally enjoying a lovely spring morning.  

Our first stop of the day was visiting the Weta Workshops.  S has a colleague who used to be on staff, so instead of the normal tourist tour, we got a real behind-the-scenes tour of the workshops.  We saw animatronics, props, sculpting, metalworking, leatherworking, digital modeling, design, business relations, and so many more areas.   We got to talk to a lot of the artisans and craftspeople, and we even got to meet founder Richard Taylor, who paused from working on a project to talk with us about his work and Weta.  S was treated like royalty, mostly due to her proximity to certain green puppet NOT named Kermit, and I had a great chat with the design leads about how they sculpt their business and what they look for in new hires.  It really was a stunning experience, and we're all grateful to A for taking a few hours to lead us around.  We signed NDAs, so I don't have many photos from the tour.  

H holding a filmed prop.  S holding a fake Sting.

Another troll, another attack on H.

After the extra special tour, we had a quick lunch and returned for a crafting class run by a Weta staffer.  We worked with two kinds of clay.  With the first one, we each made a creature head, and our leader T taught us how to build the heads in a methodical way that still left a lot of room for creativity.

The Cabbage King.

The second clay got hard quick, and we used it to practice making textures - we made reptile skin, hair, and mammal skin texture.

H working on hair texture.

After the crafts class, we decided to bail on our tourist-level tour (we had a better one anyway!) and instead headed back to the Central Business District of Wellington, to Cuba Street.  Cuba Street is full of shops and restaurants.  At least five bookstores, 3 musical instrument stores, four record shops, ten shoe stores, and countless restaurants.  It was a lovely way to spend an afternoon.  I wandered into Alistair's Music and spent 45 minutes talking with Alistair and his wife Katrina.  They had about ten banjos on display and about ten lifetimes of experience that they had lived.  They regaled me with stories of Rhiannon Giddens spending hours in the shop falling in love with an Irish banjo.  They showed me a Moroccan banjo ancestor that smells like camel piss once it's warmed up.  They showed me an Afghani rubab that is super rare now that the Taliban has banned them.  What a great way to spend an hour. 

Dinner was at a Turkish place called Kisa (yum!), and then home to chill out and plan tomorrow's adventure!