New Zealand Road-Trip: Part Six

Now it's been very clear that you've been wondering about the Lord of the Rings scenery I've seen while traveling around New Zealand. Well, up to this point, I hadn't seen any specific locations. But that changed on the next day of our trip. The next three days were all about Lord of the Rings! Here we go!
Wellington Tour
Alex and I treated ourselves to the full-day tour, but before we saw any locations, we received an interesting bit of information: the mountains from the movies are from the South Island. That's right, the same island we just left. That means the mountains we had been seeing for about a week now are the ones from the movies. Isn't that neat?
Helm's Deep/Minas Tirith

No, Minas Tirith and Helm's Deep are not actually there. In this quarry, both the Helm's Deep set and the Minas Tirith set were set up. However, not the entire buildings were set up. In the movies, for full shots of Helm's Deep and Minas Tirith were made by creating 'bigatures' (big miniatures) and shooting them with South Island mountains put in the background. For scenes with people (and not when they can see Helm's Deep or Minas Tirith in the distance), a set was made that was about two-stories tall. At the time of shooting, Wellington citizens did not know that the quarry was being used for these movies, that is until people saw actors driving around with Uruk-hai makeup on. After that incident, the buses had darker windows.

The River Anduin

 'Now wait a minute, Drew' you're asking, 'The River Anduin is surrounded on both sides by tall cliff-sides. Why would you lie to me? Is it something I said? Do I smell?' First, yes, you do. Please shower more often. Second, this location was used for the close-up shots of Aragorn and Boromir. The shots of one of them are mirrored (I don't remember which).
Now how did they get shots of hobbits with these regular-sized characters? A few tricks actually. The hobbits were put in a bigger boat to look smaller than they actually are. When you see hobbits talking and there's a person in the background, it's actually an extremely tall person in that character's costume (notice that his face is not shown). When a taller character is talking and hobbits are also seen in the boat, the hobbits are actually dummies (and they're also replicas).
Some of the other parts of the River Anduin are in South Island, near Queenstown. Apparently, we drove by it during our travels. Oops.
Rivendell
Trivia: This is the only location (besides the Shire) that has a sign referring to what it is.

Aragorn finds romance here. No, wait, that was a set after it didn't work here

I think Frodo's room was here

Elrond lived here, in the grass. It's comfy

There was some Rivendell over here

Those in relationships may want to avert their eyes, for this picture is simply too attractive. You ready? Are you sure?

Yeah, that's right

Let's test your LOTR knowhow: Which character also had pictures taken at this tree, and what movie was it for?
???

The above 3 pictures are all from the same LOTR location. I have 3 questions for you:

1. What location is this?
2. What scene are we doing?
3. Which character am I?

While here, we learned several movie facts that may give you hints on the questions. My character rides into this location through a gate, which was filmed using a small gate and a perspective trick. Also, the location has been mirrored because the 'good guy' (which I'm playing) needs to appear in the scene from a certain side of the screen.

Wellington Sights

On the way to the next major location, we stopped at a scenic view of Wellington. Needless to say (but I'm saying it), it's expensive to live here.

Outer Shire ('Shortcut to Mushrooms')

The 500 km tumble

No, this is not the Shire (yet). This scene was shot 500 km away from the shire set. In fact, when the hobbits start falling, they are in Matamata, but this shot of them falling is in Wellington, 500 km south.

Who am I in each of these pictures? A clue for the second one: there is supposed to be a CGI (I think it was CGI) tree over us while the Black Rider searches. Also, if you watch this scene from Fellowship, you'll notice that the Black Rider seemingly appears from nowhere in the shot, since he didn't come from the right side of the tree. This was not on purpose.

The Black Rider appears!

But where's the tree that hung over the Black Rider? More CGI? No, that was a perspective trick. Don't be stupid. Also, did you notice the Black Rider doesn't have visible breath, but his horse does? The horse is supposed to appear alive, but the Black Rider isn't. Did they edit out the breath? Wrong again (you're really bad at this). The Black Rider was using a long snorkel that ran down the back of his cloak so that his breath wouldn't appear in the shot.

Running hobbits

 This location is where Frodo, Merry, Pipen, and Sam run away from the Black Rider. But why is Sam only in some of the shots? It's a funny story.

When Sean Astin got the part of Sam, he was what I would call 'Sam size', slightly portly like many hobbits. But before shooting started for LOTR, Sean Astin decided to get fit, and he did. This did not please Peter Jackson. So Peter Jackson changed Sean Astin's diet to doughnuts and KFC before starting shooting. Sean Astin quickly became 'Sam sized' again. However, this new diet was (obviously) not very healthy for Sean, so he was physically unable to run in every shot, especially since Peter Jackson likes to shoot extra shots for good measure.

Lunch Break

I neglected to tell you that during this entire tour, I was slowly starving to death. You see, the morning of the tour, Alex and I underestimated how long it would take to find a good (as in free) parking spot for our car, so we skipped breakfast (besides a mueseli bar). The tour bus picked us up at 8:30 am and lunch was scheduled for about 1 pm. What's worse, our tour guide gave us a snack after showing us Rivendell, but the snacks were brownies and muffins. Both of those have milk in them. But eventually, lunch time arrived.

Between the times of those 2 pictures, we drove by Peter Jackson's house. It was smaller than I imagined, but it had nice architecture and it was by the water. We were asked to not take pictures of his house.

This is where we had lunch. I had 'Smeagol's Salmon Benedict' and a feijoa fizzy-drink. Interestingly enough, a feijoa fizzy-drink tastes exactly like sparkling-cider. Who knew? You didn't. That's who.

WETA

WETA made many of the LOTR props among other movies (such as District 9). We got to tour a gift-shop and one of their offices. That feeling welling up inside you is jealousy, by the way.

I'm a great photographer! Turituri!

Most of these things were for sale (including the statues, I think). Along with browsing and brewing desire for collectables, we were shown an exclusive movie talking about WETA's origins (which is fuzzy) and their all-around awesomeness. Following the gift-shop tour, we were lead through one of WETA's offices. We learned their design process and saw many of the original props from LOTR. That is except for Aragorn's sword. Viggo Mortenson used a real sword in his scenes (including ones in which he was holding a sword straight up with one hand), unlike the other actors. So that's cool.

That concluded our Wellington LOTR tour, but those weren't the only LOTR sights we saw in New Zealand, or even that week.

Bonus: Embassy

Before we left Wellington, we stopped by a local movie theatre. In fact, this was the movie theatre used for the world premiere of Return of the King and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

Also, this thing was outside

Since I'm writing this from the San Francisco airport and my flight boards in 20 minutes (or so), I'm going to stop this post here. Never fear, I will finish this road-trip and I plan on continuing the blog because there are many things I didn't even mention. Until then, cheers.

New Zealand Road Trip: Part Five

Yep, I knew it. I waited too long to write. I'll have you know that I have very good excuse is time. I was busy being in Australia and studying (not at the same time). Yeah. Don't you feel silly now? Good.
The next day was going to be a boring one. No big plans for us. We had been driving along the 'scenic' route before this point, but that road ended. Just a boring day of driving for us.
Puzzle World
But wait, what is that?! Puzzle World?! We needed to pull over immediately! So we did.
Some background: Puzzle World wants to mess with your brain. There's your background. $5 for more.

Puzzle World seems to have misplaced Physics

Try not to vomit

Let me explain the above picture. You are to go into the room and walk from door to door (without going too close to the front of the room). As you walk, you will notice that the ceiling will either get lower or higher depending on where you started from. You are then tasked to watch the footage and see that it looked like you shrunk or grew while walking. So that's a real thing.

With our perceptions perplexed, we decided to give ourselves a break and go into a nice, easy maze.

The objective of the maze is to reach the four towers (each a different colour to make it obvious), and then walk back to the exit in as little time as possible. It was supposed to take an hour or so, but we made it in half an hour. Not bad, eh? And a good ten minutes of that time was spent after we had reached all four towers and were trying to leave. We walked in circles a seemingly infinite amount of time.

The view from one of the towers

Our next destination, glaciers

Sometimes I'm happy

The detour set us back a few hours, so we arrived at our new campsite after dark (again). Bravely, I dared to face the cold again and sleep in that tent another time.

Driving and Glaciers and Driving

I wasn't that cold. My life was spared for now. Today was going to be a good day (especially since I lived to see it).

This was a busy day. We were to drive to the Franz Josef glacier, take a peek, and drive six more hours to Picton, the last town we would see in South Island.

Franz Josef

We arrived in the rain, with a few hours walk ahead of us. It's a good thing that I didn't bring a raincoat. But I can't complain (except that I did), the view was worth it.

Fun fact: In 2009, the glacier reached the spot I'm standing in

I didn't have to deal with a wet jacket for too long, because we weren't planning on stopping on the way to Picton.

The Hostel

The last South Island hostel

This place has a hot tub and free food. Yeah.

We picked up fish n' chips soon after parking, then topped it off with free ice cream (except for me, I don't get to be happy).

Ryn and I soaked in the hot tub for awhile and reminisced over what we had seen so far. My favorite part (still true for the entire trip) was off course Millford Sound.

Picton-Wellington

To get to the North Island, we needed to take a ferry across the Cook Strait. Because we're smart (sometimes), we rented a car that came with complementary tickets for that day. Now we just needed to wait.

We ate breakfast while waiting to get on the ferry. What's on the menu? None other than tortilla sandwiches! That's right, we even got to choose between peanut butter and jam or salami that had been drenched in pepper due to a faulty pepper shaker (which I threw away following the meal).

This is what a ferry looks like

What do you do on a ferry for 3 hours you ask? Excellent question! You watch cricket. Kyle and I sat and watched 1 game of cricket for the entire ferry ride. Now I...almost have an idea on how to play cricket. Hooray!

Wellington

Wellington
North Island, time for a new set of adventures! We checked into our hostel and made a plan. We were to stay in Wellington for 2 days. So what was there to do? We decided to visit a museum on the first day, and then Alex and I would visit some locations that pertained to a certain franchise the next day.
Te Papa
 If you wanted a translation, te papa can mean 'the ground'. Aren't languages cool?

View from the exterior of Te Papa

This is a giant squid

Maori art

A hint on that franchise

The above picture shows a marae. This is where Maori meet for various purposes (I'm not exactly sure on the specifics). I would go in a marae several days every week for my Maori class, but it didn't look like this. This is beautiful. I've never seen anything like it, and it was an unexpected gem in the museum.

The treaty room. Featuring the Maori-British treaty

Streets of Wellington

This building looked fancy, but we discovered soon that it wasn't. I want you to guess what it was. It's something we all know, and some of us love.

Though the museum was an experience to remember, the next day featured sights that we've all been waiting for for my entire trip. See some of them next time!