As if you need­ed anoth­er rea­son to live in New Zealand! The won­der­ful Dowse Muse­um in Low­er Hutt has just re-launched and is now call­ing itself The­New­Dowse … AND they’re host­ing a King Kong exhi­bi­tion from June to Novem­ber this year!

They’re call­ing it Becom­ing King Kong. I feel excit­ed just think­ing about it!

It’s open­ing on 23 June and runs until 11 Novem­ber 2007. A wee bird tells me that it’s packed with insights into the ground-break­ing film-mak­ing tech­nolo­gies used to make the movie, as well as the cre­ative process­es used in the con­cep­tion of the char­ac­ter of Kong. That’s right — the grumpy ape that keeps on turn­ing up in the film.

The exhi­bi­tion will take you behind the scenes to expe­ri­ence the Weta way of work­ing, the expan­sive col­lec­tion of the sculp­tured crea­tures, the beau­ty of the sketch­es, the inno­v­a­tive tech­niques and the secrets of how these were achieved: it took thou­sands of draw­ings, hun­dreds of design maque­ttes and Weta Dig­i­tal’s visu­al effects team years of work to cre­ate the char­ac­ter of Kong.

To cel­e­brate the exhi­bi­tion, we’ll be reveal­ing pre­vi­ous­ly nev­er seen before online images from the mak­ing of the film in the new Weta Gallery …

Coming soon