Te Papa Tongarewa: Dreamworks

I have posted about Te Papa Tongarewa (mostly called simply Te Papa) before, as it is definitely the most amazing museum I've ever been to and I have gone many times. I like museums, but don't actually want to move at a snail's pace, reading long descriptions next to each item. This sometimes surprises me about myself, as I can sit in a chair for hours, not moving at all, reading descriptions in a book. But anyway, Te Papa is a perfect museum for me, because it is engaging, beautiful, diverse, and does not simply rely on reading signs.

Recently, J and I went to Te Papa to see the Dreamworks Exhibit. Most of you will know that J and I love animated children's movies, whether they are by Disney, Pixar, or Dreamworks. So we were understandably excited to hear that Dreamworks was coming to Te Papa. We didn't know exactly what the exhibit would be like, and it definitely exceeded whatever expectations we thought up. What we were most impressed by was how visually beautiful everything was. It makes sense, but I'd never thought of how many stunning works of art would be created in the process of making an animated movie.

These are masks of characters from Magadascar: Maurice the leemur, Gloria the hippo, Melman the giraffe, a stack of the penguins, and Alex the lion.

These are models of most of the main characters from Kung Fu Panda, which is J's favourite movie in the world. Good job, Dreamworks. It's hard to tell in the picture, but the models are unbelievably detailed!

This is a watercolour of one of the smallest dragons in How To Train Your Dragon (another of our favourites). It's such a charming painting.

This is a painting that was based on a real Chinese painting, which served as inspiration for the visual effects of Kung Fu Panda. Sorry about the reflections off the glass.

This is a wall-sized video we watched of a voice actor doing a read-through of a scene from Shrek. His voice acting skills were amazing, and it was cool to watch him move from one still frame to the next. They use this process to figure out how the scene will sound, and modify it accordingly.

This is an actual set from Wallace and Gromit (which I didn't even know Dreamworks had done). Everything in this set was actually in the movie, except Gromit himself, as the characters in the movie are made of soft clay, so that they can be moved and positioned.

This is the mural of Africa that inspires Marty the zebra to want to escape the zoo and go to Africa in the first Madagascar.

This is Berk, the island settling of How to Train Your Dragon. Again, difficult to tell in the picture, but in real life, it's like a whole, complete world.

These are paintings of different settings for The Croods, which we actually haven't seen yet, but if it's that beautiful, we will need to!

Last, but not least, we got to use animation equipment to animate a short segment. J figured out how to use it immediately, and we made some short videos of a foot kicking a ball and such simple things. It was quite fun, but it reinforced my belief that I do not have the patience to be an animator, as the 15th time we drew almost the same picture was the end of my attention span, and I really think that a feature-length video is a bit more of a time commitment than that. I'll stick to watching them.

It is great to be living in the same town as Te Papa, and I'm eager to see what other exhibits come our way in the near future. I actually have more pictures to share from other times I've gone exploring in the permanent exhibits, but I'll save them for another day.