Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. We broke this one over a month ago in this report here! I'm happy this didn't fall through. Weta Digital is the best effects house working right now, so it doesn't surprise me that someone as demanding as James Cameron has picked them to handle the effects work on AVATAR. The officialy press release is below!!!

Cameron Taps Weta Digital for AVATAR Wellington, NZ (August 3, 2006) — Avatar brings together the industry’s top visual effects talents. Academy Award® winner Joe Letteri and Weta Digital have signed on to create visual effects, creatures and digital environments for James Cameron’s much-anticipated and innovative new motion picture, Avatar.

“Weta has proven themselves a leader in visionary effects, especially in the area of performance capture based character animation, which is a big part of my new film,” says writer/director James Cameron. Cameron continues “Along with their world-class capability comes a genuine passion to blaze new trails and to entertain a global audience with groundbreaking techniques. I'm really looking forward to the collaboration with Joe and his team.”

Academy Award® winning producer Jon Landau adds “Weta has an incredible depth of creative talent that has continually proven their ability to create technological innovations that allow filmmakers to tell stories which could not otherwise be told. They have the unique ability to seamlessly integrate these technologies into the movie in ways that the audience never questions the reality of the cinematic presentation. We look forward to pushing Joe and his team even further down the road of photorealistic visual effects.”

“Avatar tells a new kind of story in a world we’ve never seen before,” says Weta Digital’s Senior Visual Effects Supervisor, Joe Letteri. “It demands a whole new set of film-making techniques. Jim is known for that kind of originality, and we’re excited to be doing this film with him.” Weta will draw on the expertise it developed for such ground-breaking films as Peter Jackson’s King Kong and The Lord of the Rings trilogy to bring Avatar to the screen.

Weta has previously collaborated with Fox on X-Men 3 and I, Robot. A full-service visual effects studio, Weta Digital Ltd. is located in Wellington, New Zealand.