You know those bargin bins of DVDs?  My wife found some movies for a Black Friday sale of just $.49.  Yes, that’s 49 cents.  And among the ones she brought home was “Nim’s Island.”  What a deal!

As I watched the movie for the first time, I kept saying to myself, “That looks like Jodie Foster.”  I didn’t think it was really possible because she always seems to be in big budget, big name movies.  I had never heard of “Nim’s Island.”  And the character wasn’t some beautiful, glamorous woman.  When the credits rolled, there she was.  Jodie Foster.  And a check on IMDB.com said it was a made in 2008.  How could I have missed it?

I enjoyed the movie.  It was a great family movie.  Then I listened to the commentaries by the directors/writers and leading actors Jodie Foster and Abigail Beslin.  Foster said one of the reasons she did the movie was to have something she could watch with her kids.  The movie also starred Gerard Butler who was the star of “300.” Quite a change of pace for him.

The commentary by the directors/writers is worth the cost of the DVD (whatever you pay for it).  This was their first major motion picture and it was done on a low budget.  Their comments explained how they were able to make the movie for such a low cost.  For example, they used more than 450 special effects using some computer graphics, models, and lots of compositing.

This should be very instructional for independent producers/directors (DV Rebels) working on small budgets.  Most of the FX could be done on a personal computer.

Some cost cutting techniques were very simple.  Child actors are only allowed to work 9 hours.  To reduce shooting days, a double was used whenever Nim’s face (Abigail Breslin) was not toward the camera.  For example, there was a close-up conversation with Foster where she turns and walks away.  The shot walking away was done by a double.

One of Nim’s friends on the island was a seal.  Two were actually used when one of them became unresponsive.  You can only feed them so much fish.  But putting seals on the beach risked having them swim away.  So all shots where you see seals on the beach were composites using green screened seals.

I highly recommned this movie just for the commentaries.  It will help you improve your film’s production values without a big boost in costs.

– Rich Pulham

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 14th, 2008 at 4:29 pm and is filed under Dailies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.