Wellington's Tākina venue to display LEGO Star Wars: The Exhibition

A new exhibition at Wellington's Tākina venue is set to transport Lego and Star Wars fans to a galaxy far far away.

LEGO Star Wars: The Exhibition opens to the public this weekend. Wellington is the first international stop on the exhibition's global tour, and only New Zealand stop.

From stepping into the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon to life-size recreations of some of Star Wars biggest duels, fans of the franchise will be able to find many of their favourites immortalised in brick at the exhibition.

Ryan McNaught, more commonly known as 'Brickman', who helped create the exhibit, said it took more than 25-thousand hours to build.

"We've created models at various scales," he said.

"We've got some which are life-size - particularly the fight scenes and a lot of characters and droids and people that people will be familiar with in the Star Wars universe."

"Also we've tried to capture some of the enormous spaceships and creations and vehicles that people will know in Star Wars - we've had to shrink those down, funnily enough."

One character that got a bit of a special treatment was C3PO.

"For the very first time in my Lego career - and I've been doing it a long time - is we have our C3PO model where I had the bricks custom made particularly for that model, which has never happened to me before and is quite a treat."

The Lego builders had to submit a request to the Lego Group in Denmark to get the custom made bricks in Pearl Gold and Metallic Silver, with each brick costing about 3€.

"So it's a very expensive Lego model," McNaught said, estimating the cost of the build to be over $100,000.

The exhibition also has several life sized character builds, including Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, Count Dooku and Moff Gideon.

"Over the years, we haven't done a lot of them simply because they are so difficult and time consuming, more so than others."

He said while building a generic person might take about 150 hours, building a specific person could take three times as long.

"So we don't do it very often, but Star Wars got the special royal treatment."

McNaught said the most difficult build was General Grievous.

"In the Star Wars films General Grievous is actually a 3D render or a digital version and doesn't exist in real life," he said. So having to recreate something that doesn't exist in real life in real life where we have to worry about gravity and all sorts of things like that was incredibly difficult."

Alongside the spectacular builds, budding Lego masters could also contribute to the exhibit with several build stations and interactive elements.

One of the most popular he said was to recreate your own lightsaber.

"To become a Jedi, the lore is that you have to recreate your own lightsaber, and so we've essentially got build stations where you have all the bricks you need to recreate your lightsaber," he said.

On screen the lightsaber would then come to life.

"You can have lightsaber battles with other people around you, and you can take a photo and you become an official Jedi," he said.

Tākina Commercial Manager Syd Duflou said the venue's first exhibit in 2023 was a Brickman one and they are excited to host another.

"With Jurassic World by Brickman it got great attendance when it was here so we expect this one to perform equally or if not better."

Duflou said since Tākina had opened it had brought roughly 120 million of economic impact to Wellington across its exhibition programme and business events.

She reckoned Lego Star Wars would be a hit with the fans.

"The Star Wars theme, the space theme, and Lego combined is kind of the best of both worlds," she said.

LEGO Star Wars: The Exhibition opens on Saturday the 27th of June.