Weta Workshop’s VFX specialist Sir Richard Taylor breathes life into giant-sized human figures

The special effects company that has created props and costumes for the theatrical spectacle like the Lord of the Rings trilogy in the past and most recently also worked on its first Indian film in Shankar’s ‘I’ has lent its expertise to bring the Anzac tradition alive through a series of giant-sized figures on display at The Museum of New Zealand.

Sir Richard Taylor’s prop and special effects firm Weta Workshop was commissioned to develop a series of larger-than-life figures of soldiers and nurses to recreate wartime scenes for the 100th anniversary of the Anzac’s doomed Gallipoli campaign.

Sir Richard said that making the figures enormous rather than actual size made audiences naturally more eager to investigate them.

“Should you take a person and increase them in scale there’s a natural desire as a human to explore them with your eyes, discover what’s unique about them in their oversized state,” he said to 9 News Perth.

The filmmaker said the end results were “characters that emote at a depth of detail and emotional intent like nothing we had undertaken before”.

Sir Richard used models that closely resembled real life soldiers and nurses and had them pose for photos before digitally scanning them and creating casts of their faces and other parts of their body.

The scans were then digitally cleaned up and 3D printouts of the various body parts were created before they were painted and had details like hair and clothes added.

The finished products are currently on display at the Museum of New Zealand in Wellington for a commemorative exhibition titled ‘Gallipoli: The scale of our war’.

“Showing these soldiers at scale and sharing the intent of these people give them presence and power and cause a moment of reflection,” Sir Richard said. “As an audience member you can view and become engrossed in and engage with, at maybe a level that you never could a one-to-one scale mannequin.”