Miles from the glitz of the 85 Academy Awards, a group of university students will be waiting, with crossed fingers, to learn if multiple Oscar-nominee "Beasts of the Southern Wild" wins.

Not just because of an Oscar pool. Thirty-three students from San Francisco's Academy of Art University worked for months to craft most of the post-production visual-effects for the independent feature.

Staged in a poverty-stricken Louisiana bayou, "Beasts" is up for four Oscars, including Best Picture - a coup for a film made on a shoestring $1.5 million budget, "without name actors and relying on baby pigs to be our monsters," said the film's producer Josh Penn.

The fantasy drama, narrated by an imaginative 6-year-old called Hushpuppy (played by Oscar nominee Quvenzhané Wallis), was no easy visual feat, encompassing explosions, relentless flooding and stampedes of pig-like creatures called aurochs.

Students worked from 10 to 40 hours a week as part of the academy's "Compositing in Production" class dubbed Studio 400A, an advanced elective wherein students offer free visual-effects work for low-budget films.