The Wellywood sign - vote now!

Now is the time to cast a vote for the "Wellywood" sign. Cast your vote here. The vote closes on Friday, November 18 and the winner will be announced on Monday, November 21.

The sign will be located at the entrance to the Miramar suburb. Elsewhere in Miramar you will find Park Road Post Production facilities, the Stone Street Studios, the Weta Workshop, Weta Digital, the Weta Cave, the Roxy Cinema, and huge number of other film industry companies.


There's been a lot of local debate for and against the sign. Personally, I'm totally in favour of it.

The Wellywood sign would be perfect - it yells "film industry", which none of the other options do. That was the whole point of the sign in the first place. Currently, if you are a visitor to Wellington, there is nothing to photograph as an iconic "Wellington film industry souvenir" photo. Paris has its Eiffel Tower, Sydney has the Opera House, New York has the Statue of Liberty. And of course, Hollywood has its sign as well. Our little town isn't important enough for a tower, but a simple sign on the hill would be perfect.

Some of the early options included a giant Weta (a NZ insect), or the phrase "Middle-earth". All cool signs, I'm sure - but Wellywood is more than the Weta Workshop, and certainly more than the Middle-earth films. Even in Wellington, there are lots of people who don't realise the Weta Workshop has been involved in more than 120 movies since the LOTR trilogy; including such huge franchises as Narnia, and the X-Men movies, and of course Oscar nominees Avatar and District 9, and more recently the new Spielberg/Jackson production of Tintin.



The two other options - the Taniwha (a sea-monster from Maori mythology), and the wind-blown Wellington sign - are interesting choices, but neither say anything about Wellington's huge achievemnents in the world's film industry.


"Wellywood" celebrates it in one iconic and easy to recognise sign. Vote now, and lets get this going viral among Wellington's many fans outside the country! Please repost this message elsewhere too!

Again, you can cast your vote here.

  - Jack Machiela, from the NZ Noldor blog


PS - in case this is reposted and the hyperlink is lost - the voting link goes to  http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/wellywood-or-what/wellywood-poll/5927480/Vote-now-The-final-Wellywood-vote

Update on preliminary casting call - it's official!

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Further Update 24/9/2010, 7:00am: The prelim casting call has also now been listed on TradeMe's job section.
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Update 23/9/2010, 12:21pm : Also check today's article in the DomPost, also posted on stuff.co.nz.
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Moments ago I received this email from Matthew Dravitzki, who is Peter Jackson's spokesperson:

The advertisement is official and came from our production.  A preliminary casting call means:  We don't have a green light, but we do need to be prepared in the event that we get one!  That means having a little look around Wellington for scale doubles as advertised.  This is NOT an extras casting call and anyone who doesn't meet the advertised height requirements will be turned away.


When cast, actors playing Hobbits and Dwarves will be normal adult size.  The characters in the books are sized differently, as you know.  Scale doubles appear in some wide/reverse shots in place of our actors, and with other adult actors when we need people to look smaller - or taller.  A visit to the behind the scenes content on the LOTR movies might jog your memory.


I don't have any news for you on greenlight, director or cast.  There's no update from LA at this time.  


The NZ Dance and Drama Centre is simply being used as a venue for this casting call, and is not the home of our casting department.


I hope this answers your questions.

It certainly answered mine!

Almost green light?

Today the Wellington Dominion Post newspaper carried an advertisement in the back for Hobbit doubles...tall and short people only!

I have it on good authority that this comes directly from the studios, this time it's the real thing.

It's not quite a green light but we must be getting awfully close!

- Posted from the field by Jack M.

Stone Street Studio Stage "H" update

Referring back to my earlier post on this - I've heard a few more details through the grapevine - apparently the new indoor soundstage is costing around the $10,000,000 mark, and is currently about two weeks behind schedule, what with the bad weather we had earlier this month.

The front of the large concrete building has gone up, and some of the side wall panels have appeared as well.

I've put some more photos on the original post, and I'll post more as the building comes up. Exciting stuff!

  - Jack M.

Stone Street Studios renovating?

I've been hanging onto this story for a little while, to see if I find some more details about it but I've got nothing so far.

In short, I was up on top of a certain hill last week on the 18th of September, and couldn't help noticing that one of the large sheds on Peter Jackson's Stone Street Studios (where LOTR was filmed) has been pulled down, and the concrete floor seemed to be being repoured or something. I took a quick photo of it at the time, and was looking for information about what was going on there, but I've been drawing a blank so far.

This photo faces East, for reference to the Google Map, which faces North

As you can see from the Google Maps satellite photos taken earlier this year, the big white shed was still intact not so long ago.


View Larger Map

It's getting a little hard to ignore though. I was driving towards Miramar today, and saw a rather large crane, parked on what I assumed must be the top of the hills surrounding Miramar but which turned out to be actually at ground level behind the hill, making for a rather large crane indeed. So I drove around the front of the studios again, and here's what I found:

As you can see, one enormous crane, apparently (according to one source) the largest currently in New Zealand. The four struts on the right are large concrete pillars, and look like they will be the support pillars for a huge new sound stage perhaps.

The large concrete building behind the pillars is Stage "K", at one time the third largest sound stage in the world, fully soundproof, and custom built for "King Kong" (which is what the "K" stands for - a smaller one not in this picture is called stage "R" for "Rings").

I don't have any solid facts yet - it looks like vast sums of money are being spent in preparation for a big movie - I'm assuming it's for The hobbit obviously. Perhaps it will be called Stage "H".

Let me know your thoughts - or better yet, if you have the facts, let's have those!

  - Jack M.

Pre-Production On Hobbit To Start August

The (unofficial) word on the street is that pre-production on The Hobbit is officially due to begin around August. A fairly large number of people are expected to be hired soon on contracts, to companies like Weta Workshop and Stone Street Studios.

By all accounts it couldn't have come at a better time for many - the last big project here in Wellington went completely belly-up ("Kingdom Come", a recently cancelled project about the life of Jesus Christ), and the recession was hitting people quite hard.

And of course, everyone's rearing to get back to Middle-earth!

- Jack M.