Nim's Island actually started with the intention of being a very practical shoot, with little vfx, even though the story is filled with pelicans, sea lions and lizards. All images © Fox Walden. Courtesy of CafeFX.

Any child with a voracious appetite for books will tell you the greatest adventures of all are the ones that play out in your imagination while turning the pages. But what if you have to turn those fanciful pages into reality for the big screen? The latest in a string of children's books to get the translation is Nim's Island (opening April 4 from Fox/Walden). Based on the book of the same name by Wendy Orr and Kerry Millard, it centers on the adventures of a little girl named Nim (Abigail Breslin) who lives on an isolated island with her father. She spends her days with lizards and pelicans and sea lions for company, and then turns to the pages of her beloved, imported Alex Rover books that help encourage her flights of fancy and adventure. But when her father disappears, Nim reaches out to the author of her favorite books, Alexandra Rover (Jodie Foster), to help her rescue him. Unfortunately, Alexandra is a virtual recluse but, through some twists of fate, the two come together on the island to conquer the most difficult foe of all -- their own fears.

Directed by Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin, Nim's Island actually started with the intention of being a very practical shoot, with little vfx. Visual Effects Supervisor Scott Gordon of CafeFX explains, "Early on, there had been a few versions of the script where the amount of visual effects kept shrinking with each new iteration. Mostly, I think, they were trying to bring it in on a budget. The vfx budget got smaller and smaller, and finally we got the go-ahead.

"When I read the script, I was dying to work on it," Gordon enthuses. "It's a terrific story, and it required visual effects that would serve that story, not the other way around. So it's not a typical vfx film. It involves a lot of CG animals but they don't do things like speaking. What we did was to create behaviors and actions for the animals that were theoretically possible but couldn't be achieved in camera, like getting a pelican to pick up a tool belt or getting a lizard to look at an actor and open his mouth. Our Animation Supervisor, James Straus, and his team established the comic personalities for those CG characters, with Galileo the pelican as a helper and a hero, and Fred the lizard as more of the comical sidekick."

Production on Nim's Island began in Australia in July of 2007, and Gordon went out to supervise the shoot. "They wanted someone to supervise on set, but they weren’t looking to hire a production side supervisor. Since it was primarily a CafeFX project with perhaps 10% going elsewhere, I became the overall supervisor. But Nim's Island ended up going from around 200 shots to 465, and we had an extremely short schedule and a limited budget. The post schedule went from October to February -- a little under four months. We ended up coming up with some clever ways to get more bang for the buck."

CafeFX's work included creating actions for CG animals that are theoretically possible but couldn't be achieved in camera.

With that huge increase, CafeFX immediately reassessed the work and Gordon says, "In the end there were a lot of extra shots, and there were even some cosmetic fixes that came up at the last minute. When the project grew, it made sense for CafeFX to take on all the character shots, in order to maintain consistency, so other vendors had to be brought in. We were already heavily invested in the pelican, lizard and sea lion, as well as the Fire Mountain and cruise ship shots."

When it came to assigning all the rest of the needed shots, Gordon says he worked closely with producer Camille Cellucci to select the right vendors. "Camille was the visual effects producer for Walden Media during post," he adds, "and she's had lots of experience with other vendors, and was incredibly helpful at divvying this up. I had total trust in her. We started out with Cine-Fn as the only other vendor beside CafeFX, with them handling some matte painting shots. After looking at the first assembly we brought on Digital Dream, Eden FX and Handmade Digital. Handmade is Alan Bell's company, and he was a co-producer on Nim's Island, having worked with Mark and Jen before on Little Manhattan. He was on set and helped conceive many of the visual effects shots.

"EdenFX came on to handle the big transitions and non-animal bluescreen work, like the Arabian Desert sequence. One of the biggest shots they did was a huge transition where we start from Nim in the window on her island and pull back to see the entire island, then the entire globe and then push back in past in to San Francisco, past the Golden Gate bridge and then into Alexandra's window. They also did a shot where Alexandra is in her rowboat where the camera goes up through the weather to the top of a hurricane and then back down into it to see Gerard Butler lashing down his boat in the storm. They also had the opening sequence, and another big pull-back at the end of the film. EdenFX also had about 100 shots that were island removals. Nim's Island is set on a deserted tropical island, but in reality there were islands all around."

Breaking down all of the eventual vendors and shot counts, Gordon recounts, "CafeFX did 174 shots, EdenFX did 203 shots, Digital Dream did 15, Handmade Digital did 25, Cine-Fn did 17, Digital Dimension did seven, Amalgamated Pixels did 13, Halon did seven and Lola did nine. The number totals more than 465 because they were a number of shared shots… There was tremendous cooperation all around."