Hi guys it’s Henry here from Alien Weaponry and what you’re
seeing at the moment is the behind the scenes for Hatupatu.
The story of Hatupatu is a really, really old, almost mythical tale
in Māori history where an ancestor, or tupuna, of Lewis and I
encountered a bird woman – this witch in the forest while he
was out hunting for birds. And she catches him after he
accidentally spears her and takes him back to her cave.
He becomes her slave from that point. And I guess a less PG
version of the story, which I think a lot of older people like to tell,
is that he was kind of her unwilling sexual partner as well. So,
she captures him and he obviously wants to get back to his
home, to his family, and so he steals her taiaha and her korowai,
her feathered cloak. He kills all of her pets - her lizards, her birds -
in the cave, which she keeps as pets and spies as well. And one
bird escapes, the miromiro, and warns Kurangaituku that
Hatupatu has actually escaped, he’s run off and stolen her
taiaha and her korowai. Kurangaituku starts chasing Hatupatu
down and obviously her being a winged creature she can travel
very fast and travel very long distances as well. The story says
she leapt from mountain top to mountain top.
She is kind of this monstrous, fearsome beast that towers over
people. So with the video we really tried to capture that. I feel
like we did a pretty good job there. And part of that, as well, was
Te Tuhimareikura Hopa who played Hatupatu. He did an
amazing job at kind of portraying that fear. Your know, the fact
that Hatupatu was just a boy when this happened. And then
Dayna Grant, who played Kurangaituku. She did a fantastic job
really making the costume we had move as well as using the
stilts we had her on. Which is something I don’t think a lot of
people could do, they’re these kind of spring loaded stilts that
make it look like she’s got these weird angular legs. She’s done a
fantastic job with that.
Something interesting as well was shooting the video, we shot it
out at Waipu Caves where we had actually shot a number of
other videos before, namely Kai Tangata. We had some shots in
the Kai Tangata video where we were playing at Waipu Caves.
But this time around we decided to lug all our gear up a hill.
So we spent maybe, I would say two and a half, three, maybe
three and a half hours lugging – you know drum kit, guitars,
playback stuff, a generator, all the camera gear – everything up
this hill through the dense bush of New Zealand. And that was a
mission and then we shot all day. By the time we were done it
was probably close to midnight. We then had to bring all the
gear back down from the hill in the pitch black. But that’s really
how we do it as Kiwis.
We had, for the flying shots of Kurangaituku as well, a team of
riggers rig up wires in this big group of trees. And so that’s how
we were able to get flying shots of Kurangaituku.
Anyway, I hope that provides some cool insight into the behind
the scenes, the-making-of of Hatupatu; which was a rigamarole
in itself. I think it took five days for us to film everything.
And um, yeah. Chur!