新西兰英语 251 BAFTA Awards
The winners of the BAFTA (the British Academy of Film and Television Arts) awards on Sunday included the New Zealand company Weta Digital for the visual effects in the movie Avatar. Weta Digital used some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers to design the Na’vi characters and the Pandora world in 3D. The whole movie used 1 petabyte of digital storage. One petabyte is 1 million gigabytes, or 10 to the power of 15 bytes 1.
Avatar is also nominated 2 for the best visual effects in the Academy Awards next month. Another movie, District 9, is also nominated in this category. Weta Workshops designed the aliens in District 9 and Weta Digital designed the mother-ship. Both companies are partly owned by the New Zealander Peter Jackson.
Peter Jackson was the director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong. Weta Digital designed the visual effects in all four movies using computers. Weta Workshops made some of the characters, their masks and their costumes.
Peter Jackson was also a producer of District 9 which is nominated for Best Picture in the Academy Awards. He lives in Wellington.