Weta designers create penguin double
25 Mar 2009
Creative talent at Weta Workshops, New Zealand’s Oscar-winning film industry specialists, can be credited with another world first - this time it's a mechanical replica of an endangered yellow-eyed penguin.
Just a month after producing a mermaid’s tail for a New Zealand woman who’d lost her legs as a child, Weta has answered another unusual request to come up with a life-like penguin to help a German production company filming a series in New Zealand’s South Island.
Penguin star
The yellow-eyed penguin has a starring role in the film Out of the Ashes based on a book by US novelist Emilie Richards.
German production company Polyphon International has been working on the film for German television network ZDF since January.
Filming began in Akaroa on Banks Peninsula near Christchurch, and has now moved to Dunedin.
The movie involves a marine biologist who moves to New Zealand and works with yellow-eyed penguins, but because the birds are endangered, using a real penguin for the film was out of the question.
Breathes and flaps
That’s where Weta Workshops stepped in, creating an extremely life-like yellow-eyed penguin double that breathes and flaps its wings.
Covered in artificial fur, the penguin has a foam latex skin on a fibreglass core. It is crowned with a vac-form (hard shell) head housing the servos and other animatronic components.
The 'posable' neck bends and stays bent, and the wings and feet are also articulated.
The penguin is able to ‘breathe’ thanks to inflatable bladders fed by a tube. All the internal components are accessed via an invisible ‘service flap’ under the penguin's belly.
Real feathers
The penguin plumage was made with artificial fur, carefully painted to achieve a realistic look.
Weta’s team spent many hours getting the colour gradations and hues just right.
Finally the bird was adorned with real feathers - not from another endangered yellow-eyed penguin, but voluntarily discarded by other birds.
In the film the penguin is injured and found on the beach by Julia, a marine biologist who has run away from a violent marriage and started a new life in New Zealand.
On the day she arrives, Julia finds the yellow-eyed penguin with a wound and a broken flipper caused by a collision with a boat. She realises it has a bad infection and is undernourished so takes it to the Marine Wildlife Centre where rangers and scientists are fighting to prevent the extinction of the endangered species.
More information:
Tale of NZ's own little mermaid
German film crew finds paradise in New Zealand
These topics may also be of interest to you
|
