The scariest thing for The Mist’s VFX Supervisor Everett Burrell wasn't the film's horror elements, but rather the small budget and short schedule. All images © The Weinstein Co., 2007.

Director Frank Darabont has had plenty of success adapting Stephen King's work on The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, so taking on The Mist, a King novella first published in 1980, seemed like a natural for the director.

Visual Effects Supervisor Everett Burrell says Darabont chose CafeFX as the lead house on the film via a recommendation from Guillermo del Toro, who used the Santa Maria, Calif.-based shop on Pan's Labyrinth.

While The Mist is a fairly straightforward horror film about a small town enveloped in a heavy mist that brings other-dimensional creatures with it, the scariest thing for Burrell was the small budget and short schedule.

"We talked a lot about what to do and the reality set in about the budget," he says. "There was no money. The budget for the entire film was $17 million."

But the story had fans that were thrilled to be working on the project, regardless of the budget. "I almost fell out of my chair because The Mist is one of my long time favorite short stories or novellas from college," says CafeFX Animation Supervisor James Straus.

The famed KNB created practical effects for the creatures. At times, the practical effects required digital tweaking or even replacement to get the look and movement the director wanted.

While the tight budget was a huge challenge, Darabont added a stylistic wrinkle that was going to have a huge impact on the vfx. "He'd directed an episode of The Shield," Burrell says. "The way they shoot that show is with two cameras at all times and basically the camera operators kind of grab these little moments. It's a very freeform style of filmmaking. Once I heard that, I realized the camera tracking was going to be a nightmare. We had to come up with a plan, we had to set rules like you can't zoom during effects shots."

The film was shot in Shreveport, La., in six weeks. "It was just like guerilla warfare and we tried to keep our heads above water," Burrell adds. "I was behind Frank the whole time so I could always hear and predict what he's thinking."

Burrell says they also collaborated with famed KNB, which created practical effects for the creatures. At times, the practical effects required digital tweaking or even replacement to get the look and movement that Darabont wanted.

To facilitate the vfx process, a photo model was created of the set. "[We] shot like 300 photos of the environment and stitched the environment together," Burrell explains. "We sent the whole set to CafeFX so they had a really good starting point."

Straus says it was also a huge boon to have a well-defined space for all the action to take place in. "We built the rooms first, before we had any creatures. We could go in with virtual cameras and could block out all the shots before we even had the characters constructed," he continues. Since they had the actual space built in scale, they could begin animating early in the process.