On the Fence. (digital video).(Rabbit-Proof Fence )

Although it did not receive an Academy Award nomination, the critically acclaimed Australian film Rabbit-Proof Fence has garnered numerous industry honors during the past few months, including Best Film at the Australian Film Industry awards for its focus on the forced resettlement of Aboriginal children in the 1930s.

Rabbit-Proof Fence tells the true story of three young Aboriginal girls in the Australian government's resettlement program and of their escape and subsequent 1500-mile journey to rejoin their ancestral community. Trekking through the parched, empty landscape and relying on their tribal survival skills, the girls search for the one feature that can guide them home--the massive barrier fence, constructed as a bulwark against a plague of rabbits, that spans the continent. When it was completed in 1907, the fence was the longest in the world. Today, large sections are still maintained.

For the movie, director Phillip Noyce wanted to illustrate the vastness of the fence by using a minute-long shot, filmed from a helicopter, showing the structure extending into the distant horizon from the girls' homeland. "It wasn't cost-effective or practical for the production department to build a hundred miles of real fence for this shot, so we completed the task with computer graphics," says Jason Bath, visual effects producer at Fuel International, a Sydney-based effects facility.