Creativity Award updates
The art of creating another world
Imagine if your job was to build another world, a place unlike this one with a whole different ecosystem and a plausible flora and fauna (like Avatar)? With only the limitations of your imagination to hold you back and a design brief that’s top secret, how exciting would that be?
Samuelu Siilata is loving his internship at Weta Workshop.
That’s what Pacific Youth Awards winner Samuelu Siilata is doing during his internship at Weta Workshop this year. He’s also working on The Hobbit and is fully immersed in the props shop. That work is highly confidential, so we won’t be writing about it here.
Now in the fourth month of his internship, Sam can’t wait to get out of bed every morning to find out what he’ll learn and create at the Workshop. “What’s so good about being here is you’re not just learning how to conceptualise, you’re actually making something into a reality. We’re creating an environment, actual worlds or cultures. You can delve into any space, futuristic or historical and actually create these worlds so they’re believable. They (Weta) don’t just design things, they think how it would be used and designed at the time. That’s so special. You need to have that in order to create the masterpieces.”
Weta founder Sir Richard Taylor keeps abreast of all that’s going on in his Workshop and says Sam is a great asset to the team. “He has aptitude, willingness and clear-headed thinking. He is a maker and that is a critical thing. He can manipulate material and has creativity at his fingertips, plus he’s a thinker. From what he tells me he comes from a family of makers, and that’s a wonderful foundation for a future in this career.”
Samuelu comes from a family of makers.
Richard and his wife and business partner Tania Rodger decided to become part of the Prime Minister’s Pacific Youth Awards because it seemed “a worthy thing to do”, he says. “We’re involved in a number of endeavours and we’re often asked if we’ll donate money, but we would much rather donate opportunities in paid work. When it was explained to us what the awards were all about we thought we should be supporting this in terms of an internship.”
“Tania was actively involved in the interview process and found the calibre of applicants staggering”, says Richard. “The selection committee had already picked the finalists and therefore made our job easier because the calibre was already very high. It was hard choosing from the final three but we feel we made the right decision. We’re very very pleased and we could not be happier with results thus far. It’s a two-way relationship and having Sam as the first recipient of this award has been a very positive experience.”
An important part of the selection process was choosing someone who wanted to make a career out of the type of work Weta was involved in. “The reality is when we hire we want to people who want to make what we do a career. A young person who comes in requires a huge input of intellectual and creative inspiration. We have to find people who want to look at this as a career.”
Sam is definitely one of those people. Before he even started at Weta, he had his eye on the film industry. “It’s far better than what I imagined. Everyone is encouraging, it’s really open, you can ask anyone a question, and you feel like you’re part of a team” says Sam.
