The Lord of the Rings Design Workshop Is Bringing an Insane Insect Exhibition to Australia

After bringing hobbits, dwarves and walking trees to life in The Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films, New Zealand's Weta Workshop has their sights set on something smaller for their next project: bugs. Forget sending creepy crawlies scurrying across cinema screens, however. A creative collaboration between the five-time Academy Award-winning special effects wizards and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington, Bug Lab: Little Bugs, Super Powers will be scampering through the Melbourne Museum.

With its Australian premiere season due to infest the Nicholson Street institution between 23 June and 15 October, the immersive exhibition gives little critters a big stage — and a boost in size as well. Visitors can get up close and personal via ultra-detailed large-scale models that look like a cross between colourful bug art and everyone's giant bug nightmares, with six particular specimens in the spotlight: the orchid mantis, bombardier beetle, jewel wasp, dragonfly, Japanese honeybees and katipō, aka New Zealand's most dangerous native spider.

If you're easily spooked by insects, you might want to stop reading. Or, perhaps going along and getting a bug's-eye view of the world will help? Physical and digital adaptive stations will allow attendees to explore bugs' abilities in detail, test their own against them, and probably inspire a few folks to pretend to be Spider-Man. Elsewhere, bug chambers will showcase their adaptive skills, delving into camouflage, mind control, super speed, swarm intelligence and deadly venom.

A section dedicated to the ways in which the creatures in question are influencing new technologies — think fly-like collision-tolerant drones, nanotechnology based on butterfly wings and 3D printed objects created from silk — will also be included, in what promises to be much, much more interesting than any bug-related science lessons you took at school. And if you just can't get enough, the attached IMAX theatre will be screening Bugs: Mighty Micro Monsters 3D during the exhibition's run.

Bug Lab: Little Bugs, Super Powers comes to the Melbourne Museum from 23 June and 15 October, 2017. For more information or to buy tickets, head to their website.