Weta teams up with big guns 

It's a project that will bring Sigourney Weaver and James Cameron to town and will be made, in part, in Wellington.

Avatar is being touted as a futuristic, ground-breaking film, and as Weta digital's visual effects maestro Joe Letteri told ONE News, Weta, along with hundreds of Kiwi contractors are helping to make it happen.

The film is Cameron's latest project. His last film was Titanic - the very same Titanic that was released 12 years ago and is still the highest grossing film ever made.

It has a reported budget of $260 million and Cameron has come half way round the world to make a large chunk of it in New Zealand, where he can get creative collaboration and of course, ground-breaking technology says Weta digital.

"One of the big things we are trying to do with Avatar is to do this movie completely as a 3-D movie... 3-D in the old days used to be funny glasses with the red and the green and two projectors and all that sort of thing, but we have a new system now for doing digital projection for 3D films," says Letteri, a multi-Oscar winner and a digital effects pioneer.

Letteri, says Cameron built a new camera system to shoot the movie entirely in 3D. "It will be a completely new experience for the audience," he says.

It will be a new experience for theatre owners too. No theatre in the world can as yet handle the technology. they will need to upgrade in order to even get the film on the screen.

Cameron will of course, at some point, be in town but as of yet that is still all top secret information.

"It's a science fiction story so a lot of it happens in the future and there are just other worlds and other realities that we have to create, plus a lot of characters and creatures. I probably can't tell you any more than that but it should look pretty fantastic when we're finished" says Letteri

The film will be released in 2009.