Gandalf – Embassy Theatre Wellington

The material list is the joke and the engineering both. Grass skirts make convincing robes and beard at a distance and weigh almost nothing; bamboo skewers give a polystyrene armature its texture and structure; and the whole assembly had to survive a Wellington spring, which is not a trivial requirement in a city built on wind. Hennah said it was built to endure the weather, and that the greatest challenge was working out how a piece that size could go up in a public space at all.

The premiere transformed the theatre around it. The Embassy installed a new sound system, 3D-capable screens, new projectors and new carpet for the occasion, and Wellington closed its streets and turned out in numbers that made international news.

The sculpture was always temporary and is long gone. What it marks is a genuinely unusual moment: a country's film industry at its absolute high-water mark, and a capital city willing to put a nine-metre wizard on a 1920s picture palace to prove it.