Ngāti Toa Rangatira & PHF Science
Te Awarua Kai Ora
Ngāti Toa Rangatira & PHF Science
Te Awarua Kai Ora
A river’s story, told by scroll.
The Story of Te Awarua is an immersive scrollytelling site — eleven chapters of river, whakapapa and restoration, one continuous journey in 3D, motion and te reo Māori. Launched at Pātaka Art + Museum, live at teawaruakaiora.co.nz.
Narrative chapters, from the karanga to the future.
A Three.js scene woven through the scroll journey.
Content file driving every chapter — the whole story in one source.
From first commit to final polish.
Launched at Pātaka Art + Museum — live at teawaruakaiora.co.nz.
Māori narrative structure — whakataukī, karanga, whakapapa.
Not a website about a river. A journey down one.
Te Awarua Kai Ora is a story of kaitiakitanga — a river, the people bound to it, and the mahi to restore it for the generations coming.
A story like that can’t live in a template. It needed to move the way the awa moves — so the site opens with a karanga, travels through time and whakapapa, and arrives at the restoration work happening now, every chapter flowing into the next as you scroll.
Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au.I am the river, and the river is me.
An identity drawn from the awa itself.
The taniwha Awarua, the tuangi gathered from the harbour bed, and a mark that carries both.
The identity isn’t decoration laid over the story — it grows out of it. The koru form echoes the shellfish the harbour has always fed its people, so the mark itself speaks to the mahi of return.
Creative development, end to end.
3D, motion and story in one continuous build — no CMS, no template, one crafted artefact.
Eleven chapters, one scroll
Every chapter driven from a single content source
A story you travel
Eleven chapters choreographed to the scroll — cloud, water, time and restoration unfolding as one continuous journey rather than a page of sections.
Culturally grounded
The narrative follows a Māori structure — whakataukī, karanga, whakapapa — with te reo carried through the design, not decorating it.
Craft at the edge
Three.js, GSAP and procedural noise in one build — the kind of creative development that shows what the studio can do when the brief is a story.
Content with a future
Every word and asset flows from a single structured content source, so the story can grow without rebuilding the experience around it.
Not every story fits a template. This one got a build of its own.