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