George Port

A film fan from an early age, George Port feasted on movies for free while growing up in the Hutt Valley — thanks to his grandfather running a shop which adjoined the local cinema.

Later, while experimenting with computer animation at Victoria University, Port got some useful advice from legendary animator Euan Frizzell. Six months later, having animated some talking robots, Port was offered a job at Frizzell’s company Gnome Productions. Port worked on a variety of animation from stop motion to developing some basic computer animation systems.

During a quiet week at Gnome, Port heard about a puppet film being shot in a flat near Parliament. The film was for a self-funded television pilot called Meet the Feebles. The director was Peter Jackson. “When I turned up they handed me an elephant suit and said, ‘Here, put this on ... there wasn’t much on, so I just took a week off and went off to be a puppeteer.”

Port’s involvement in Jackson’s films would grow in league with the director’s burgeoning career. When Meet the Feebles was reborn as the director’s second feature film, Port was one of two people helping bring despicable Feebles' boss Bletch to life. On follow-up feature Braindead, he was one of the puppeteers helping create some of the film’s gore-soaked effects, and ended up cameoing on-screen as a party goer who loses his head. Port also shot a yet unseen video diary of the film’s making (as he had for Feebles).

Port had already made one short film of his own: 1989's Revenge of the Word Processors, in which future Shortland Streeter Michael Galvin battled gremlins conjured from inside a computer. Jackson’s producer Jim Booth now won funding for him to start on the ambitious Valley of the Stereos. Near-wordless and loaded with special effects, the film chronicles a pump-up-the-volume battle between a nature-loving hippy (Danny Mulheron) and the noisy bogan next door (Murray Keane).

Heavenly Creatures (1994) marked the point where Port's interest in computer animation was first applied to feature films. The CGI dinosaurs of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park marked a moment of change for special effects. Port first caught the film in 1993, while visiting Los Angeles for a computer conference. He quickly gave Jackson a call, telling him they were onto a winner. "Any doubts that you before that time that computer animation would take over the world were quickly swept out the window. Because you saw the dinosaurs, and you thought, 'this is it' ". 

Port, Jackson, and four others leased a scanner, a recorder, and a Silicon Graphics computer. The Oxberry 3000 scanner was only the third of its kind in existence. But it was Port alone who was charged with trying to get them to work together. One had just two pages of instructions. Port provides a tour of the equipment in this 1994 TV report.

Port spent at least seven months working solo on Heavenly Creatures, from altering balconies and adding model castles to hillsides, to morphing landscapes into imaginary visions of paradise. Initially the new digital effects operation was grouped together with the physical effects handled by Richard Taylor and Tania Rodger, under the umbrella title Weta Ltd. Later Weta Ltd was split into two parts: Wētā Digital, and Taylor's Wētā Workshop.

Over the next two years, Wētā's digital operation grew exponentially, upskilling on the run, and relocating from a cramped house near what is now Massey University's Wellington campus to the Camperdown Studios complex in Miramar. En route, it balanced fantasy Jack Brown Genius, created battle scenes and decaying movie sets on Forgotten Silver — for which George Port cameos on-screen as a certain pioneering aviator — Australian dog movie Napoleon, and Jackson’s first Hollywood-funded feature, the effects-heavy Frighteners.

Port then moved north to Auckland. While still at Wētā, he had worked with American production company Pacific Renaissance Pictures on its first forays down under. Now he began helping out on the company's flagship shows  Xena: Warrior Princess and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, for the shooting of scenes whose digital effects were being handled in Hollywood. After successfully teaching one of the Xena crew how to use Photoshop to do a matte painting (a technique for combining two images in one shot) Port slowly began building up the Auckland-based effects team, and winning over Renaissance to the idea of letting him take on more of the digital effects for their various New Zealand productions. 

By the turn of the millennium, the dream of going local had become a very busy reality. Port's team led the effects on Pacific Renaissance shows Jack of All Trades and Cleopatra 2525. . The new shows were completed in New Zealand, as well as shot there. Cleopatra 2525 was especially effects-heavy; each episode required an average of 200 visual effects shots. In the same period, PRPVFX transitioned from an inhouse department of Pacific Renaissance, to an independent company.

The five year period between The Frighteners and Cleopatra 2525 demonstrated the pace of change in digital effects, and how quickly state of the art equipment could become both cheaper and out of date. "What amused us to no end was that the $100,000 computer we bought for Frighteners, the updated chip from that was what went into the Nintendo 64 for $200."

PRPVFX has gone on to provide effects for a run of TV series, feature films, music video and shorts (including the award-winning Cow) — plus Auckland Maritime Museum’s show Te Waka. The homegrown projects have seen Port’s team creating unusual flocks of sheep for Black Sheep, flying angels for The Vintner’s Luck, and dinosaurs for documentary The Lost Dinosaurs. They also supplied memorable shots of the hilltop Māori village in Vincent Ward’s Rain of the Children, and handled Port’s own short, adventure Egg and Bomb. 

PRPVFX partly owes its longevity partly to 19 seasons of effects-heavy kidult series Power Rangers. Other American projects include work on the CGI costume for movie Green Lantern, TV series Legend of the Seeker, and Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon, Port was among those nominated for a Visual Effects Emmy for 2002 miniseries Superfire, which imagines a city threatened by a forest fire.

For 2005 movie comedy Racing Stripes, PRPVFX created CGI mouths and lips, so that the live action animals could speak, while on Amazon sci-fi hit Ash (2025) they handled the effects for 340 shots. In 2024 the company ventured into virtual reality, with the release of its first game: Splatsplasm sees players boarding an abandoned spaceship and facing off against waves of alien creatures. 

During time spent in the United States, Port befriended veteran actor Mark Blum. The two ended up working together on animated film Audition for Hell, which Port directed and acted in. Blum did not live long enough to see it reach the screen; he died in 2020 after contracting Covid-19.

Profiled written by Ian Pryor; updated on 14 October 2025

Sources include
George Port
PRPVFX website. Accessed 14 October 2025
Splatsplasm website. Accessed 14 October 2025
Clare Burgess and Brian Sibley, Weta Digital: 20 Years of Imagination on Screen (New York: Harper Design/Weta Ltd, 2014)
Ian Pryor, Peter Jackson - From prince of splatter to lord of the rings (Auckland: Random House New Zealand, 2003)
Bret Ryan Rudnick, 'An Interview With George Port' (Visual Effects Supervisor NZ)' Whoosh website. Loaded 2001. Accessed 14 October 2025
'Audition in Hell', FilmFreeway website. Loaded September 2021. Accessed 14 May 2025