Tippett Studio created Bugsy, the children's comic-relief guinea pig with the gigantic eyes. The character had to look photoreal and cartoony at the same time.

Berton and Johnson both used the latest in communication tools to oversee the work being done on the film. Berton says he used video iChat, instant messaging, video conferencing and cineSync to review shots with vendors in remote places.

According to Berton, another concern in the pipeline was color timing. The movie was shot with Genesis digital cameras and to ensure colors weren't ranging all over the place, the visual effects work avoided doing any color correction at all, working on raw footage from the camera. "Which it turns out was pretty effective, because the camera was very well calibrated. It delivered almost exactly the same color no matter which camera we were using or what day we were using it on," he says.

Johnson used the time difference between his base in L.A. and his London crew to his advantage. Cinesite created a mirror of its London digital dailies room in L.A., with the servers updating comments and changes from each end automatically to the other.

"The team was in London and essential looking at the same thing, calibrated in the same way." Johnson adds. "They were able to see me, I was able to see them. I could kind of point to the screen to give my feedback, they could see what I was pointing at and kind of make changes accordingly."

Johnson says he would spend his days reviewing sequences and shots with Shankman and Berton at Sony, and then provide notes and requests for changes at the end of the day. When the crew came to work in the morning London time, they could start work immediately and have changes and updates ready for Johnson to review by the time the sun rose in L.A.

Berton says his favorite sequences are the chariot race and the space station. "Both of them really play on the screen. They're bit, spectacular and imaginative," he says. "You believe it, it's realistic and it looks like a real story."

Thomas J. McLean is a freelance journalist whose articles have appeared in Variety, Below the Line,i>, Animation Magazine and Publishers Weekly. He writes a comic book blog for Variety.com called Bags and Boards, and is the author of Mutant Cinema: The X-Men Trilogy from Comics to Screen, forthcoming from Sequart.com Books.