This is a brief tale about innovation in New Zealand.
 
According to Richard Taylor, founder of the New Zealand-based Weta Workshop, New Zealanders have to be innovative – in a rural setting, you have to be able to improvise and make things with your own hands, because you are far away from people who will do it for you. 

Taylor, as a child, loved sculpting; he made sculptures with mud from riverbanks. Later, he made a living by making sculptures for weddings out of margarine.  That passion ultimately evolved into Weta Workshop, a film and television effects facility that created Gollum, the  Tolkien character in Lord of the Rings that won an Academy Award for special digitized effects (its lifelike image, partly because WETA found a way to actually show blood corpuscles beneath Gollum’s skin, known as ‘subsurface scattering’). Weta also created the amazing modern version of King Kong.

The name ‘weta’ comes from a huge New Zealand bug, in turn named after the Maori word Wetapunga, or “God of ugly things”. 

Film producer Peter Jackson hired Taylor, and the WETA team, to do special effects for his Lord of the Rings trilogy. That film too was an innovation – filming three movies at once, in the New Zealand mountains, during a 15-month period, in adapting Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings masterpiece for the screen. The opening installment alone grossed $870 m. worldwide. 

Jackson knew he would need the Gollum character for his third movie, (The Return of the King, 2003) – but the technology for it did not yet exist. Yet he contracted with WETA, hoping the digital-effects industry would provide a solution in time.  Thanks to Taylor, it did. Gollum, a truly ugly thing, is based on a real person, Andy Serkis, and his voice, features and movements. Gollum was created by digitally ‘painting out’ Serkis and replacing him with Gollum – done frame by frame.  And every frame of Gollum’s performance (and there were a great many) took four hours to compute!  

The key elements that embody all pathbreaking innovations are all there in Gollum – risk taking, improvisation, vision, dreams, creativity. It is remarkable how the character Gollum assumes lifelike reality on the screen. And equally remarkable how in remote New Zealand a former margarine sculptor has revolutionized the way movies are now made.