Weta teams up with big guns
It’s a project that will bring Sigourney Weaver and James Cameron to town and will be made, in part, in Wellington. Avatar is being touted as a futuristic, ground-breaking film, and as Weta digital’s visual effects maestro Joe Letteri told ONE News, Weta, along with hundreds of Kiwi contractors are helping to make it happen. The film is Cameron’s latest project. His last film was Titanic – the very same Titanic that was released 12 years ago and is still the highest grossing film ever made.
Sometimes, I just love being me…This week Houghton Mifflin sent me a surprise package which to my delight contained ‘The History of the Hobbit’ part 1 and 2 by John Rateliff. Each volume is available now, while the 3 book set (which included The Hobbit) is available for pre-order on Amazon.com today. Be sure to pick up your copy today!!
Jeff Anderson is not a nerd. The 40-year-old chief executive of Westwood (Mass.) video game developer Turbine is six feet tall, with the frame of an NFL linebacker. Nevertheless, he presides over a vast and rapidly growing virtual world of elves, orcs, dragons, and hobbits. In April, Anderson’s company took the wraps off the Lord of the Rings Online, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) for PC, based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic books. The explosive growth of the game—players have created some 4 million unique characters in just five months—has vaulted the company into the top tier of online game design companies and made it the largest privately held developer of massively multiplayer games in the U.S.
Susanne writes: ‘In Business’, a BBC Radio 4 programme, includes an interview with Richard Taylor on his approach to business. ‘In Business hears from .. the man who created the special effects behind the movies of Lord of the Rings and King Kong.’
It’s time for Wellington to honour its home-town heroes says communications specialist Roger Ellis who is standing for the Wellington City Council in the Northern Ward. In recent years Wellington has produced some exceptional people. The whole world knows what Peter Jackson has almost single-handedly achieved – a major league movie industry right here in the suburbs of Wellington. He has received a theatre-load of awards from the good and the great throughout the world. “Yet to date the Wellington City Council has done little to honour this outstanding favourite son. The same could be said for Weta’s Richard Taylor.
Kristin Thompson, author of The Frodo Franchise: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood, writes: I am going to be doing a signing event for The Frodo Franchise in New York on September 27. It starts at 7 pm at Barnes & Noble Upper West Side, 2289 Broadway at 82nd Street (
WELLINGTON, New Zealand – New Zealand’s Mount Ruapehu erupted, spewing out ash and rock that injured one climber and forced around 50 people to be evacuated off the mountain, local media reported on Wednesday. The 10-minute eruption started at about 8.20 p.m. on Tuesday and sent a cloud of ash and dust to a height of 15,000 feet, Geological and Nuclear Sciences said.
Roheryn writes: The latest Entertainment Weekly article hails Viggo Mortensen’s infamous bathhouse brawl in the buff as the harbinger of a new age of naked fight scenes. Huzzah!