When I first joined Weta, there were 6 of us, and we were in the front room of a small house in Wellington. After initial tests, we moved to Weka St in Mirimar, where the rest of the crew were assembled as the cinema was built next door.
For the Frighteners I designed the pipeline and scripts for the Ghost Effect and set up the software GUI to streamline their use. The “Blobman” effects were all done in Explore and Dynamation; both products were eventually bought by Alias and evolved into Maya. Stephen Regelous wrote custom code to provide convolution surfaces (a polygonal version of metaballs). There was a lot of working overnight and sleeping under desks to get through the huge shot-count.
3DCGI 