'Nim's Island': A CG Menagerie That Kept Growing

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."

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."

With all the constraints, Gordon adds that CafeFX had to get really creative with their hero animal shots, as the order kept increasing due to production challenges. "For example, there are many, many CG pelicans," he offers. "The real ones don't fly because their wings are clipped. Trained pelicans were supposed to be used on set, but in many cases that couldn’t be done without vfx because the pelicans tended to bite or run away when they got close to an actor. I remember we were trying to shoot with the pelican and Gerard Butler and there were two pelicans playing Galileo. All it had to do was sit there, but as soon as Gerard would say a line, the bird would run or peck at him. So we had those kinds of problems but we solved it with a split screen. It was a little tricky, since we couldn’t lock off the boat, but we managed. There were quite a number of CG pelicans, but we also composited real pelicans that we shot against bluescreen, against partial sets, or that second unit shot out in the wild. Any time we needed something like a pelican picking up a tool belt, it was CG, though. We also had several long shots where the pelican flies down to a little boat in the middle of the ocean, and those were CG, too, because we couldn’t get a real pelican to do that.

But for the close-ups with pelican landings, we set up bluescreens and had the trained pelican land on marks and then extracted him for the shot. Many shots were conceived in the edit room too, and for those shots we looked at what elements we had. Sometimes we used one of our bluescreen takes. Other times we rotoscoped something out of our second unit library. Every trick in the book was used. We kept our Compositing Supervisor Tom Williamson and his team busy right to the end."

Despite the proper allocation of work, Gordon maintains that additional shots kept piling in. "It got very intense in the last few weeks, and we got about 50 new shots during that period," Gordon continues, "including six new lizard shots, and one pelican shot. Those would have gone to CafeFX but we were at capacity and we had a very hard deadline. CafeFX would be able to give the models and textures to another vendor, but the rigs and the shaders were all custom. We bid it out to a few companies and I fully expected them all to turn it down, but Digital Dimension said, 'Yes.' I was concerned since this was a ridiculously short amount of time, but Digital Dimension totally came through…"

Based in Montreal, Canada, Digital Dimension jumped into the fray and helped the Nim's production meet their deadline. DD Animation Supervisor Kim Richardson says, "We looked at some stock from the other vendors to get a heads up. We didn’t get too many shots so it wasn’t too hard to get the animation done quite quickly. It was fun. They supplied us with all the models and the textures so we basically had to re-rig them because we had the lizard, Fred and the pelican, Galileo."

Considering they had to match prior work, Richardson adds, "We studied the movement of the lizard. It was real lizard animation so we looked at the BBC Motion Gallery for eye movements. He didn’t really move that much which was interesting because we had never really done a real lizard before. We looked at the real lizard on Nim's shoulder and used that to match. It worked and wasn't difficult for us. We had three animators on the job and used Softimage. We would animate the shot, give it to the lighting guys and then it would render out and go to comp in a blocking phase to the director. We would get comments back and then render it with the final patches."

Despite the headaches and scary turnaround, Gordon says enthusiastically, "I have never had an opportunity to participate at such a high level creatively. The directors and producer were wonderful people, who were very inclusive in terms of wanting to hear ideas."

Tara Bennett is an East coast-based writer whose articles have appeared in publications such as SCI FI Magazine, SFX and Lost Magazine. She is the author of the books 300: The Art of the Film and 24: The Official Companion Guide: Seasons 1-6.