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MASSEY is published by Massey University, Private Bag 11-222, Palmerston North, New Zealand

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MASSEY has a circulation of 75,000.

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Oscar Winning Special Effects
Richard Taylor Bachelor of Design

Remember the 2001 Oscars? Peter Jackson, looking — as has so often been observed — hobbit-like. Richard Taylor with his mother in the limo. Taylor towering above the small-but-perfectly-formed stars of Hollywood. Taylor gleefully hefting those two Oscars like barbells. You wished the Oscars were like the America’s Cup and we could host them in Wellington. Casual dress, bring your mum, the invitation might run.

Through all of this, Taylor was obliging. This was an event he wanted the nation to share; there were messages he wanted to convey. Then, as the brouhaha began to die down, Taylor quit the limelight. Like Bilbo, he slipped on the ring and vanished from the party. This is his sole post-Oscar interview.

If, among the celebrity guests at the Oscars, Richard Taylor and Peter Jackson looked like the products of an aberrant evolutionary path, it is because they are. Hollywood blockbusters, sure. A Miramar blockbuster? It strains belief.

Weta Digital, an enterprise based in a small industrial estate in suburban Wellington, has been cited by Wired magazine as one of the world’s top five digital effects houses. How unlikely is that?

And in this wildly improbable saga, the story of Richard Taylor’s climb to become the armourer of Middle Earth and an Oscar winner is as unlikely as any.

Taylor grew up on a cattle farm at Hihi, near Pukekohe. It wasn’t the underprivileged upbringing the mythology demands of artists. This was a lifestyle farm; Taylor’s father was an engineer, his mother a science teacher. But it was isolated, and Taylor grew up in happy ignorance of there being any such thing as a movie industry. Taylor made his own fun. “For me, it came down to the cotton reel, the rubber band, the matchstick and the wax candle. Making tanks that you wind up and zip across the vege patch. Keeping yourself amused, inventing these worlds in your mind…” Taylor applied artificial wounds to his sister “and turned the mud in the local creek into big sculptures”, he says. “And, of course, I was always a huge toy soldiers fan.”

A movie industry? Taylor claims that until he was 17, he’d imagined Close to Home (the Shortland Street of the day) was a true story, shot in somebody’s home.

Taylor went to Wesley College in Pukekohe. A Mäori boys boarding school, it specialised in agriculture, Mäori studies and rugby. (Jonah Lomu would later be a student there.) Still, for all that, an art department had started up at around the time of his arrival and he remembers a “wonderful” art teacher. “I wasn’t a rugby player, but there were students there who were wonderful in helping me through – I can’t ever recall feeling any peer pressure. Wesley College was good at celebrating people who had a focus, who had a purpose. They could see I had that focus, so they left me to it. I guess I was very tenacious and pragmatic.”

He read precociously: “I had a slow start – I’d been severely dyslexic as a child – and at Wesley, more out of fear than through any good tutoring, I managed to learn to read well. So I began reading very heavy novels, from what I guess was a very early age.” He read Graham Greene, then Aldous Huxley, and H H Munro – better known by pen name Saki – whose perfectly formed short stories usually carry a mordant twist. (Taylor names Saki’s Open Window as his “all-time favourite” story.) “As an Edwardian satirical writer, Saki has the driest wit. I still read his stuff heavily and repeatedly. I love the way he engenders these dignified worlds of pomp and ceremony, but once you get under the skin, it’s all hilariously embarrassing,” says Taylor.

As for what he wanted to be: “I had developed this almost belligerent belief that I would one day be doing art for a living, without even understanding what that meant.”

In the seventh form, with the school careers adviser having fixed on the idea of his becoming a dentist, Taylor came across a Wellington School of Design brochure. “I immediately knew this was it,” he says. “I was already three months behind in starting a portfolio, but I jumped on a plane and flew down to the open day. This was the first time I had ever met another individual my age who did art, who did things with their hands, and it was like God’s rays had burst through the clouds and hit me,” he says. “I was shy and quiet, and I had no ability to chew the fat with the other prospective students, but I just knew I had to be there.”

He went home and put a portfolio together. The work was poor, he says – he lacked much guidance – but he submitted it and hoped. “And I failed to get in. It was a very sad time. But then, three days before the course started, somebody dropped I out, so (former Design School head) Bill Toomath rang me up and offered me a place.”

At this point, Taylor famously strayed into the wrong enrolment queue – graphic design instead of industrial design. “It was all very, very embarrassing. I was so quiet, I couldn’t bring myself to put my hand up and say something,” he says. “But I was soon thanking my lucky stars, because I’d come from a boys boarding school, and I quickly became very appreciative of the interaction and inspiration within this co-ed graphic design class. Besides, I probably already had many of the technical skills that industrial design would have provided.”

Naturally, he wore his gumboots and Swanndri to campus on the first day it rained. “This went down like a lead balloon among my cashmere-clad classmates.” It wasn’t Taylor’s year. Underprepared compared to his classmates, he was the recipient of a stern talking-to by Bill Toomath. He’d be “out on his ear” unless he improved.

Improve he did. He moved in with his lifetime partner Tania Rodger (whom he had first dated when he was 14: “we played toy soldiers together in my fort”), settled down and became more focused. “I started chatting to people, made some friends, started to understand the formula, what you had to do to pass. I guess you could say my study sort of rocketed from there.”

His classmates, he says, were wonderful and supportive, while they remember Taylor as hard-working, and with a penchant for bending the rules.

“It was supposed to be graphic design, but if you gave the guy any flexibility at all, he’d be off into these 3D projects, these big cardboard models,” says Gary Stewart, now of Pacific Design. “I remember once we were doing point-of-sale display projects, and Richard managed to turn up with a 3D model of the bottom half of a train.”

“I would alter the brief so it was applicable to my skill,” says Taylor. “And fantastically, the tutors were understanding. They very graciously and cleverly allowed me to explore these different media, so over those three years I really got to understand materials at an incredibly high level.”

Taylor didn’t want to be a designer or an illustrator. He was singularly focused on making things with his hands.

“Of course, in design school you spout on about being a designer, because you’re supposed to spout on about that stuff,” he says.

“While I was also quite good at photography, typography and graphic design, I knew that ultimately, the tight constraints involved in these disciplines would limit my creativity.”

On graduating, Taylor took up an “incredibly well paid” job at a Wellington design studio, creating board games. He quit after six weeks, taking an 80 percent pay cut to work for the Gibson Group, painting ‘flats’ for blue screen advertising shoots. Within two weeks he’d switched departments to become a model maker for TV commercials.

“I started out directing the cheapest and cheesiest TV commercials you have ever seen. Those 10 second frames for Weetbix [breakfast cereal] where I cajoled people into lending me their husky dogs, scrounged Antarctic explorer gear, made my own artificial snowfield, then acted in it... In the process I was able to engender in my bosses the sense that there was a lot more in my mind than in my hands.”

When he overheard a conversation about the Gibson Group being lined up to make Public Eye, the local version of the British satirical TV series Spitting Image, Taylor immediately went out and sculpted a bust of boss Dave Gibson from margarine. “I put it on his desk, under a rubbish sack. He said ‘Great, you’ve got the job, you should have just asked’.” Some of his puppets are still a feature of Wellington’s parliamentary watering hole, The Backbencher. It was “crude and immature” work, he says, but lots of fun at the time. By then he was working full-time with his partner Tania Rodger.

“Fast and cheap, that was the idea. Carved in margarine, moulded in plaster and poured in latex, with roll-on deodorant balls for eyes. It’s incredible to think that three of us turned two puppets around a week, while the Spitting Image team in the UK were doing one every 18 days, with a crew of 36.”

Wellington being a small city, it was inevitable Taylor and Peter Jackson would cross paths. The two were already aware of each other’s work. “We were doing a TV commercial, and I recall Peter wandered into the shoot. We hit up a friendship, and he said he’d just finished Bad Taste and was moving on to Brain Dead, would I like to be part of it? I said ‘I’d love to’ and left Public Eye to join him, only to find six weeks later that the whole thing had fallen over through lack of funding.”

The next morning Jackson called to say he had another film up and running, the ‘muppets on acid’ feature film Meet the Feebles. “This was a crude piss-take, a satirical look at life within a theatre, while taking the mickey out of the much-loved Muppet show,” says Taylor. “And it was also immense fun. Tania and I were two of a team of four puppet makers working under Cameron Chiddick. The working environment was abysmal, but the community was such that everyone had a ball. For me, Meet the Feebles was an incredibly euphoric experience.”

On the back of Meet the Feebles, Taylor and Rodger were employed by Jackson to run the effects workshop for the resurrected splatter movie Brain Dead. “We hired nine talented young New Zealanders and did that for a year. Again, we were raising the bar on what we thought we might achieve.”

For Heavenly Creatures – Jackson’s first art-house movie – Taylor and Rodger first made the Plasticine models for the extended fantasy sequences, then turned to a then-powerful Silicon Graphics computer. Filmmaking was going digital.

“George Port started the digital effects division us-ing this one computer, and when the film ended we realised it would be tragedy if the computer went back to America,” says Taylor. “So we pooled our resources, formed Weta Digital and bought this one computer.” The purchase lumbered Weta with years of debt.

From there Jackson and Weta went on to make the mockumentary Forgotten Silver, Jack Brown Genius, and The Frighteners, which for its time had the largest number of digital effects ever used in a movie.

“Off the back of The Frighteners we did pre-production work on the King Kong remake, but it fell over after six months – other movies in a similar vein were crowding the market,” says Taylor. “Luckily, we then picked up work on the Robert Zemeckis movie Contact. We did everything from when Jodie Foster climbs into the pod until when she arrives on the beach. We also did miniatures on an American television movie. These projects saw us through the desperate time after King Kong fell over.”

Meanwhile, Peter Jackson had spent $70,000 of his own money making a documentary to pitch New Zealand as having the skills and technology to make The Lord of the Rings. So impressed was New Line chief executive Robert Shayne that he suggested three films instead of the two Jackson had asked for. The story goes that Jackson kicked his colleagues under the table when the offer was made.

“It was euphoric for starters, then daunting,” Taylor says of the undertaking.

Jackson had offered Taylor the opportunity to decide which department he and Rodger would like to look after. The pair came on board two-and-a-half years before any other department and chose to look after the design, fabrication and on-set operation of the armour, weapons, creatures, miniatures, special make-up effects and prosthetics, plus the gore and injury rigs.

“No company has ever looked after so many departments on a single film, never mind three of the biggest films ever made,” says Taylor of the military-scale operation required.

“But I’d been leading a team for 12 years already, so this was more of the same, except on a much grander scale.”

At the height of production, a workshop crew of almost 200 serviced four miniature stages and up to five outside locations. Over 48,000 separate items were produced, including 1000 suits of armour, 2000 weapons and 2200 pairs of prosthetic Hobbit-feet.

It would be the nearest simulacrum of Middle Earth a filmmaker could devise. Each culture – dwarfish, elvish, human – had to look as if it had evolved over millennia. “You can have as much passion, creativity or imagination as you like, but what if you’re trying to portray a world where people have a preconception of what it should look like? How do you fulfil that?”

Like Jackson, Taylor is known for leading by example. “I believe anger is the greatest failure in modern society, so I led without ever raising my voice in 15 years. I get annoyed like anyone when there’s some silliness going on, but I’ve always maintained you’ve got to treat people with the highest level of respect.”

On The Lord of the Rings, he insisted that New Zealand designers be employed wherever possible. Many were graduates of the Massey University School of Design.

“I wanted a young New Zealand design team that had never worked on a film before. The studio campaigned very hard to hire internationally-known film designers. But I was adamant that the youthful innocence and original eyes that the Kiwis could bring – visions that hadn’t been dictated by the pre-set paradigms of the American film industry – would add something special to the film. I held out vehemently, against considerable opposition. Peter, thankfully, was very supportive.”

The digital effects and the model making took place in adjacent facilities. To go from one to the other was a matter of stepping through a door. The collaboration and the mix of digital and physical effects was as near seamless as it could be.

“The proof lies in the film, in the awards we’ve won. These young New Zealand designers that had never worked on a film before had something special. They brought a vitality and innocence, and an other-worldly Tolkienesque brush stroke to this world of Middle Earth."


Don’t get Taylor wrong, he liked going to the Oscars and it was a thrill for his mum, but

the greatest thing about the event was the rebranding of New Zealand’s business and creative talent – photographers, designers, inventors, entrepreneurs – as mentors and role models. “It’s wonderful the way we celebrate our sportspeople, but it is our music, our art and our design that will brand us in the twenty first century.”

Prime Minister Helen Clark wins praise. “She is driven by this desire to see good come out of the artistic inclinations demonstrated by so many young New Zealanders.”

Taylor’s rural background is shared by the greater number of his colleagues. He sees this as no coincidence. “Unlike American kids, we couldn’t go out and buy our toys in a blister pack, and today, [at Weta] unlike the American effects shops, we can’t go out and buy what we need at the equivalent of the corner store.” In a wider sense, New Zealand, a long way from anywhere, also has isolation as an ally.

His message to the young is to accept that not every venture will be successful and yet take the risk. “Only by taking on things that others were unwilling to – because they were scared of failure – will you ever be innovative.”

Richard Pearce, the South Canterbury farmer who may – or may not – have been the first person to manage powered flight, gets special mention.

“How do you get a Richard Pearce anyway? Here’s this guy, growing up in the bottom if the South Island, tinkering away in his uncle’s shop. Suddenly he says he’s going to fly. He may not have been the first who flew. Maybe the Wright brothers were, but they grew up in a community of people who knew about aeronautics. Richard Pearce just woke up one morning and thought, ‘bugger it, I’m going to build a plane’ – and suddenly he’s airborne.”