Aki Ross: the synthespian poster child. © 2001 FFFP. All rights reserved. Square Pictures, Inc.

In the past few weeks, how many people have you heard ask the question, "What do you mean those actors aren't real?" when referring to the Final Fantasy trailer? During the movie did you occasionally forget that it was all CGI? I shook my head at one moment and had to smile when I wondered what real-world parts a prop gun was made from. No question about it: Square Pictures' Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within contains spectacular visuals. The realistic skin and hair get all the glory, but don't overlook the incredible amount of detail found in the animation, scenery, props and effects. At a recent Alias|Wavefront sponsored event, Square Pictures' VFX Supervisor Remo Balcells gave a peek into the making of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.

One soon forgets that the characters in Final Fantasy are merely the product of zeros and ones. © 2001 FFFP. All rights reserved. Square Pictures, Inc.

The Gray Project
When the principals of Square Pictures decided that they wanted to take the themes and title of its massively popular Final Fantasy series of PC and console games to the big screen in an entirely CGI feature-length film, they first had to prove to themselves that it was possible. Eschewing the more stylized rendering of the in-game cinematics for a photo-realistic look, they knew that there would be some major challenges ahead. So they decided to create a proof-of-concept animation that showcased the ambitious level of realism in human characters they would require for the finished product.

The proof-of-concept, titled The Gray Project, was a way to focus on both the artistic feel of the film's design and the technical complexity of generating realistic hair and skin on humans. The scene shows two women inside a futuristic apartment having an argument. While far from a compelling story, the level of drama and realism hit the mark. Balcells showed the captive audience the never seen outside of Square Pictures animation, and it was quite amazing. Ultimately, The Gray Project was an internal success which allowed Square's R&D department to prove that their production pipeline worked and they could use Maya, Renderman and custom tools to make the movie.

Aki's dream world contains the key to unlocking the aliens' domination. © 2001 FFFP. All rights reserved. Square Pictures, Inc.

Film By Layers
The film itself is composed of 1,327 shots. There are 141,964 frames, each of which took anywhere from 15 minutes to over 7 hours per frame to render. The average was around 90 minutes. Square Pictures stored 10 Terabytes of 3D and 5 Terabytes of 2D artwork. The roughly 200 people who worked on the film contributed about 120 person-years of work. All of this data needed to be carefully managed so that the creation process was collaborative and organized. This was the job of the sequence supervision department; they oversaw the work as it traveled between many departments including Storyboards, Layout, Sets/Props, Animation, Motion-capture, Lighting, FX, Rendering and Compositing.