Hi,
I found this website for the Final Fantasy Movie which explains how they made the film.
http://arstechnica.com/wankerdesk/01q3/ff-interview/ff-interview-1.html
Enjoy,
Sonix.
Nice effects, shame the script seems to have been writen by six week old lab Monkeys 
hmmmmm the production prosses kinda revelas why the scrip was week
sounds like they were far to eger to get into it.
man, looking bac, that Cg was bad.
:o
Nayman that cg set the bar a little higher
but now the things like hair and stuff are done by the computer so it looks less impressive.
I gotta say i think the dreams are the best bit of the intire film
No man, look at the last picture in that article, of the Ben Affleck look alike. Look at his suit. The textures are sooo low res, so is his model. Pretty bad pic. I didn’t like tnat movie. It wasnt real enought o warrent the hype, and the script was abysmal
Ok, the script was pretty standard for Final Fantasy, but that means pretty low quality for a movie. I’m sorry, but there were times when I couldn’t tell that the actors were animated. Some of the movements were a little too smooth, so that kinda gave it away, and not all of the movie was well done, but it had parts that left me gaping in awe.
I have to admit that I never realised the script/plot was quite so thin on the ground.
I waited and waited for this film to be finished and when watching it I was so in awe of the whole thing I didn’t even notice the lack of plot or the failings in the script.
This is a bit wierd for Square really, the plots that run through out all of the FF games are superb, seems strange that in a film cantation they couldn’t hold it together.
I suppose really you could just call it an advert for Square, Maya and Renderman. A very costly one at that. Perhaps they have now learnt that pure CG films are not going to take off just yet.
Sonix.
not just yet, but i think that they will in not too far a future…
i mean, this was not the best movie, but if it gets much cheaper to make one, more are made, and then the possibility of there being a good movie goes up. It might just take on good cg movie to start the whole business off.
d52477001
Hmmm…i remember reading that article ages ago (more like looking at the pretty pics :P) .
I think that the biggest mistake they did with the plot was to place it happen in “real Earth notsodistand future”.
They did that a lot in the '80, I can recall movies. like Warlock, which had great start, but then they just got whisked in the real time. Oh and He-man was another.
Anyhow, back to the FF. It also sucked bigtime, when they just borrowed ideas from FF7 (the mako spirit thing) but did not use them in any decent way.
Disapointment it was, the whole movie.
not just yet, but i think that they will in not too far a future…
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I think that pure CG movies will be very popular if the movie is stylised, for instance I think there may well be an explosion of Manga syle films…
But the whole CG characters replacing real actors debate, well – I just don’t think this is going to happen…CG will not replace the best actors, it just won’t work…why spend weeks/months animating a character when you could make the same shot with a real person in a day?
Having said that I do think that CG will be used to recreate actors that are either dead or getting old, Which is a great thing IF they get the CG characters to display something resembling real emotions – Final Fantasy showed us without doubt that we are a long way away from achieving this.
Lucasfilms spent 2 years in postproduction digitally creating CG actors for the Attack of the Clones film.
Take the Yoda - Christopher Lee fight scene. The only real thing in the whole fight scene is Christopher Lee’s face. Everything else is CG.
Take the Matrix 2 fight scene where Neo is fighting all the agent Smiths.
Take Titanic, 90% of the actors were digitally manufactured for the external shots.
This is already happening in films and will be happening for a long time to come. HD lens technology in films is now at a level that every shot filmed can be imported into a digital 3D CG enviroment, to be enhanced, changed and manipulated as needed.
CG actors don’t scream at the director, they don’t eat, sleep or need 100 foot long caravans etc etc.
Maybe it’s the real actors who need to be weary of their future.
Sonix.
Sonix,
You have just given me examples like yoda from star wars etc…I understand the reasons for Lucasarts to do this, puppetry will only get you so far so I think that it is justified…as with all the aliens in SW.
What I don’t understand is the need to try and create photoreal humans to play complex acting parts, which is just pointless…
And those 100 agent smiths didn’t actually act, did they? At which point did they start reciting King Lear? They were purely for special effects, same with the characters in titanic.
Final Fantasy tried to make CG characters look and act real and failed in a really spectacular way 
As for the point you made about real actors being wary of their future – Hah!! I await for the CG version of Marlon Brando or Rob De Niro with much anticipation…
Very true M@dcow.
I can’t really imagine the cast of FF SW going on to star in Broadway musicals at christmas. 
Sonix.