How do you bring the beauty of New Zealand to Los Angeles? This past December, Tourism New Zealand answered that question by creating a unique five-day immersive event space outside the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Tied to the US premiere of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, the New Line Cinema/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures feature film, The Book of New Zealand was an innovative walkthrough, multimedia installation that featured actual set elements of the film. Used for the press junket, parties, and fan events, it deftly blended technology, movie magic, and tourism.
Production Resource Group (PRG) worked closely with Tourism New Zealand and the filmmakers from the film’s production company, 3 Foot 7 Ltd., to present a truly unique Middle-earth experience for media, guests, and fans. The Book of New Zealand’s star-studded VIP opening night began with a 90-second film featuring director Peter Jackson paging through a popup book of the country’s diverse and striking locations from The Hobbit trilogy. Projected on a 50'x35' roll drop screen, the tourism video concluded with a shot of the dragon Smaug breathing fire at the audience. On cue, CO2 blasts covered the screen, and dramatic lighting emulated flames. The screen quickly rolled up, masked in the smoke, and the reveal opened up the immersive, walkthrough popup book. Filled with locations created to reflect New Zealand and including actual film sets and props, the 65'x100'x55' roofed stage invited guests to walk into the book and through the landscape.
Helming the design of this immersive event was The Hobbit’s production designer Dan Hennah, joined by the film’s supervising art director Simon Bright, and set decorator Ra Vincent. The lighting was designed by the film’s key rigging gaffer Dave Brown, working in conjunction with lighting designer Jason Deboer from PRG.
Oscar-winning production designer Hennah talks about how the idea evolved for this New Zealand Tourism event. “In the film, there is a lot of digital work, but it isn’t used for the locations; the locations are real and as clean and pure as they are used in the film,” he says. “The motivation for the popup book was to demonstrate New Zealand’s Middle-earth starring role. The beauty of those locations and backgrounds is real, not a digitally created element. For the event, it was to be like when you open the book to a scene from the film, and then you would see it morph to the real New Zealand landscape. That is why we thought it would be cool to have the actual set pieces in Los Angeles.”
Initially contacted by the film’s rigging gaffer, Brown, about getting some lighting equipment for the event, PRG was then contacted by the design team about broadening the scope of work on the LA event. Hennah explains, “PRG came on board, really as our team that would put together everything; especially the really demanding aspects of how to do this thing in the hotel’s car park. We also needed a screen that was 35' tall and 50' wide. And how do you move the screen quickly after the film clip so that we could invite people to go through the environment that we had created? They sourced that for us, and they came up with using a couple of rock stages, back-to-back, so we had enough depth to fit our set pieces in as well as have a large VIP area to host the function.”
Stage Security
PRG also brought in a production management team from Patrick Stansfield & Associates, including project director Patrick Stansfield, production manager Kent Black, and production coordinator Arturo Cisneros, to oversee the project work onsite and handle the logistics involved with this trans-Pacific project. “I work a lot with PRG,” Stansfield comments. “When they hired me for this, I brought along a couple of my very skilled, longtime associates, Kent Black and Art Cisneros. These are two of the brightest guys out there.” While Stansfield, a legend in the production management field, was the overall production supervisor, Black was production manager onsite, and Cisneros dealt with the city and the hotel, coordinating permits and security.
From Stansfield’s point of view, traffic management on the tiny 50-car parking lot was the big challenge. “The physical scope of it was amazing; it was 10lbs of stuff shoved in a 5lb bag,” he laughs. “It’s a very small piece of ground with a lot of palm trees and pavement islands, all kinds of stuff. Traffic management came hand-in-hand with this job. Trying to work in that confined lot right off a busy Santa Monica Boulevard, with all the cars and buses, is difficult, as it has a very tight ingress and egress. The biggest technical challenge was getting the equipment in and out of the site. If this project had only been in another place, it would have been a dream. We couldn’t keep empties on site; they had to go back to PRG. The footprint itself was a double-sized rock ‘n’ roll stage that took up well over half of the lot.”
Black describes the space challenge as “loading an arena show into a nightclub. We had to do all of this on-time delivery of equipment just when we needed it. It wasn’t like a typical event space like a stadium where you could just dump a bunch of gear all over the place. Two trucks came in the first day, and then the next day two trucks came in. It took us four days to build the roof structure, which normally would have taken two days.”
More to come in "Middle-Earthly Delights: Part Two."
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