A hairy, sinewy CGI arm. That's all the good folk at Weta want us to see of their latest creation, the eponymous star of Peter Jackson's highly anticipated remake of King Kong. Actually, it's not all that we see - the workshop's multi-Oscar winning chief Richard Taylor is so chuffed with his new creation that he airs video of model shots revealing Kong's snarling, scar-ravaged face. But as far as seeing the awesome ape rendered in all his pixelated glory, we have to be happy with a swift look at his right forelimb.

Away from the massive monkey, however, Weta are happy to show off many of their secrets. Sat at his laptop, Joe Letteri - an Academy Award-winner for his work on the latter two episodes of the Lord Of The Rings trilogy - punches up early test shots of a tyrannosaurus prowling through suburban Wellington. He also has some footage of a giant weta he's been working on - wetas being a species of large insect native to New Zealand. Its industrious nature and warren-like home means its name works as a metaphor for this premier special effects studio, run out of two not-especially-large buildings by what seems like a cast of thousands.

Letteri's greatest achievement on Kong isn't so much creating creatures as the dual challenge of fashioning two fully-integrated environments - the overgrown jungle of Skull Island and the concrete jungle of 1930s Manhattan. "It's always a lot harder to create things that people are familiar with," he explains. "For New York, we scoured albums of old photographs, we looked over blueprints, we checked over the history books to discover what buildings were present at the time. It was tough. For example, the Empire State Building then looked different to the way it does now, although most people would assume it's still the same. So if the most famous structure has changed, you know that other neighbourhoods must have changed dramatically."

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