Wellington: The Lord of the Rings Tour

Upon cruising from Akaroa on the South Island of New Zealand, our first stop on the North Island was Wellington, a modern city that has become the Hollywood of New Zealand. Renowned director Peter Jackson has brought the spotlight of the world to New Zealand and his home town of Wellington, which he used as his base for filming THE LORD OF THE RINGS TRILOGY. If you haven't seen the movies, then make a point of renting them.

In a country of a little over 4 million people, Peter Jackson is, according to our guide, worth about $450 million as a result of his movie making, and many of the citizens of Wellington and the surrounding areas earned livelihoods from the trilogy that filmed for 14 months but took 7 ½ years to complete. Many became extras or actors, but there were also jobs behind the scenes and in service industries that catered to the movie crew.

We booked THE LORD OF THE RINGS TOUR before leaving home directly with Wellington Rover Tours. This was the part of the trip that made our kids jealous.

Unfortunately, my video does a poor job of showing what the tour was all about, offering only a few glimpses of the scenery and what we did. Trying to describe all the things we did wouldn't do the experience justice.

Our guide Randel was an expert not only on Lord of the Rings but on photography, movies, Peter Jackson and the local area. He enthusiastically explained what happened in the movie and how the sites had been transformed by special effects, clever construction and photographic tricks. While returning sites to their pre-movie condition sounds very ecologically sound, it nonetheless seemed a shame to us.

Yes, beautiful Kaitoke Regional Park had been converted into Rivendell with creative additions, and it had been returned to just as lovely as before. In fact, because of it having been Rivendell in the movies, more visitors than ever enjoy the lovely park. Anyone who wants to be married in the area that was Rivendell can do so without charge for park rental as long as they plant a tree native to the area. However, Rivendell in the movie was magically beautiful, and the magical touches were stripped away when filming stopped. Worse yet, some very mundane to ugly stuff has been changed back from magic to what it was before, too. Take the gravel quarry that had been Helms Deep. When the movie set was stripped away, it returned to being a non-descript quarry.

I can't deny being disappointed that we didn't see the dramatic mountain peaks live on this tour. Most were actually in the South Island and transported by green screen to be in front of the actors filming in the hills above Wellington, where the actors were actually looking down at a booming 21st century city instead of gathering hordes.

Our guide Randel, a photographer at heart, explained that rather than always using expensive special effects, Jackson frequently simply used perspective, with tricks using distance to change image size like I remember doing with the neighborhood kids. The dwarf Gimli in LOR, as you probably noticed, was played by the same actor, Rjohn Rhys-Davies, who was the big, burly Arab friend, Sallah, of Indiana Jones in those blockbusters. Davies spent a lot of time on his knees, but Peter Jackson, who started as a low budget film-maker, also used perspective to make dwarfs and hobbits look shorter than the actors actually are.

Nonetheless, Peter Jackson always was concerned with the smallest details. Jackson made seemingly inconsequential changes, like digitally replacing one tree in a shot with another tree located a few feet away.

It was a great tour, including a visit to WETA, a digital effects studio that not only did THE LORD OF THE RINGS but more recently AVATAR. A local actor who appeared in AVATAR happened to be at WETA when we visited, offering to autograph a book about that movie, but the bigger stars were the costumes and props on display.

When watching those big battle scenes, most of us don't think too much about all the weapons wielded and the armor of the soldiers, but they are just as important as the masks of the Orks, and it was all created by WETA, a little company that grew with the New Zealand film industry from a couple of artists working on a low budget children's TV show into a high tech, international giant with more computing power than NASA.

I can only say that you have to go and experience it for yourself. On the day we were in Wellington, it had been announced that New Zealand would be used as the background for THE HOBBIT, which they hope will be just as much of a boon to Wellington's economy and as artistically successful as THE LORD OF THE RINGS. Maybe they'll save some of the awesome sets this time, now that they know what a big industry there can be for tourism.



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