Weta Digital, the firm behind the Lord of the Rings visual effects, today announced a licensing agreement with Microsoft that will see it use Redmond's technology in its movie, commercial and other multimedia productions.

Weta Digital, formed in 1997 by a group of New Zealand filmmakers – including Academy Award-winners Peter Jackson, Jamie Selkirk and Richard Taylor – offers visual effects for feature films and commercials. The company is best known for its visual effects work on the Lord of the Rings trilogy (New Line Cinema), and more recently for its work on King Kong (Universal Studios), all of which were directed by Peter Jackson.

"Last year, Microsoft showed us some new research in computer graphics that we thought would be a great addition to our toolkit," said Joe Letteri, senior visual effects supervisor at Weta Digital.

"We realised that by working directly with Microsoft Research, we could develop these ideas faster and spend more time on the creative effects."

Microsoft Research will present graphics research this week at SIGGRAPH 2007, the Association for Computing Machinery's 34th annual international conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques, in San Diego.