Grant Major

After boning up on set design at TVNZ and the BBC, Palmerston North-born Grant Major went on to production design movies for Peter Jackson and Niki Caro (Whale Rider). After working on Heavenly Creatures, his design contributions to Lord of the Rings and King Kong resulted in a run of international accolades, including sharing an Academy Award for Return of the King.

I experimented a lot in the early days and learned a lot of lessons and made mistakes, and had successes. There's no equivalent to just doing it and getting better at it from a technical point of view. Grant Major, in an interview with Tom Lisowski, Artstars website, 14 November 2011