The Great Wall

The Great Wall, a US-China co-production from Legendary, China Film Group, Le Vision Pictures and Atlas Entertainment, with acclaimed director Zhang Yimou at the helm, has a Kiwi connection. Wētā Workshop contributed concept design and manufactured thousands of weapons, props and costume components for the film at our home base on the Miramar Peninsula. 

Working closely with The Great Wall’s own design team, the Wētā Workshop Design Studio rendered over a thousand concepts for creatures and weapons, including shields, spears, axes, daggers, swords and arrows, all saturated in rich colour. The teams worked collaboratively on the concepts, ferrying designs through to the workshop floor when they were ready for manufacture. Although The Great Wall is a work of fantasy, its Song Dynasty-era setting meant that the designs had to embody a sense of historical realism.  

Says Design Studio project manager Tasha Guillot: “It is always a wonderful challenge for us to explore trying to create something beautiful, striking and exciting in a fantasy realm while feeling inspired and grounded within the realms of a historic period. The team relished the opportunity for The Great Wall and, I think, excelled in achieving this balance for the designs within this dynasty in Chinese history.” 

A particular challenge presented itself to the Design Studio: visualising the taotie. An ambiguous ancient motif that appears throughout Chinese mythology, the taotie were to appear in The Great Wall as living, breathing creatures. To help define how the taotie would look and move, the Workshop’s concept design team experimented with motion tests and explored ways to give even the strangest of body parts a cohesive anatomy. 

“You have to think about it in three dimensions and how it would move and what it would sound like,” says Jeremy Hanna, senior concept artist at Wētā Workshop. “Just how detailed we had to get with our approach was a challenge, but also really rewarding.” 

The enormous scope of the project was an incredible opportunity for Wētā Workshop’s manufacturing division, whose part in the project mirrored the vast scale of the production back in Qingdao, China. Artists and technicians from more than seven departments fabricated 6,500-odd props and weapons for the film’s armies and three of its lead actors. This was, by all accounts, one of the Workshop’s most colossal projects to date. 

With the cast of The Great Wall numbering in the many hundreds, Wētā Workshop’s experience on large-scale fantasy productions such as The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and Legendary’s 2016 blockbuster Warcraft came into play. Derived from a 3D modelling process, stunt weapons were cast in lightweight foam; ‘hero’ weapons in hard urethane or aluminium. 

VFX weapons were manufactured with ‘green’ or missing elements in order for VFX to treat the interaction of the weapon with the creatures of the story. Several hundred spears were produced, each one up to four metres tall — so big that they could not be shipped in one piece. 

Leather components came courtesy of Wētā Workshop’s costume department, whose artisans lent their talents to quivers and scabbards, leather wraps for the pommels of swords, and complex rigging systems that were tested on set in China and refined at the workshop in Miramar. 

Of the thousands of props produced by the workshop, 1,900 alone were arrows: one of the most complex, intricate and time-consuming parts of the project. 

Says Holly: “For this highly technical job, we had the privilege of working with master fletcher Jan Koszler. Once our crew had hand-painted and dyed the feathers, they were delivered, along with their shafts, to Jan, who carefully fletched each individual arrow — a massive task.” The shafts, complete with fletch, were returned to the Workshop where the crew cast on arrow tips in urethane, aluminium or foam, before painting and threading each end. 

As large as its part in the project was, the 65,000 hours that Wētā Workshop spent on the film was a mere fraction of the effort involved in bringing this epic cross-cultural co-production to the screen. The armies of The Great Wall, armed with Wētā Workshop’s arsenal, was released in 2017.