Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within ( 2001) (Original title: Gaia)

was a ground breaking animation film even though now the graphics would look a bit dated it was the first attempt to make a photorealistic rendered 3D featured films. Unfortunately,  thought it cost 137 million to make it only gained 85 million dolalrs world wide. (http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Final_Fantasy:_The_Spirits_Within). The plot is not fantastic but the ups and downs in the character's emotions were complemented by the music and graphics. I want to share about the amount of effort that was put into this film.

In the photo below, the animators used 80000 particles of dust for that scene to evoke a desolate world.

 

Original storyboard of Aki floating out of her chair:

Sketch of  Aki in the opening scene

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Screenshot of Final Scene:

 Thought the shot above might look very simple a lot of time was taken to get every detail right. The lighting, the hair, and how she will float out of the chair later were all discussed in detail.

Motion-capture

The still above is from the documentary: The Making of Final Fantasy. Motion capture was quite a new technology at that time. With motion capture you can map human motion onto the motion of a computer animated character. However, motion capture can lack the individuallity of hand animated characters. The animators also hand keyed the hands since some subtleties are hard to achieve.

 The animators look into a mirror to see what exactly happens when an action is performed. For example when you swallow, you blink and your throat goes up.

The animators went scuba diving to see how the bubbles in the water would look like when someone falls into the water.

 Animator:

 Final Character:

Some of the rocks were hand animated while some used dynamics simulation:

Lighting

 

For a darker, more intense mood, the lighting has to match the atmosphere. Whether it was indoors or out in the barren landscape, the lead lighting artist has to make sure the lighting is not too cheery or happy. At the beginning, there’s a lot of blue light. A lot of the key/primary lights were from a practical source. The love scene was hard to light as there was a high contrast light from the space window and the fill light had to be very soft so as to create a mysterious, romantic setting:

Compositing

The artist had to sketch several suns for the director, Hironobu Sakaguchi, as this key scene was repeated several times in the film that was about protecting the planet from alien forces.

 Texture mapping was used on the sun:

Before compositing, they had to do a lot of rendering and in compositing they would take the layers they have rendered and put it together one by one. In the shot below of Aki standing on a platform, they had to render the platform, the bar, the background, the dust and fog, Aki’s light separately before compositing. In the background, there were billboards (which they photographed from Times Square) before changing:

 Sound

Unlike a live action film where some of the sound is recorded live on set. In an animated film, sound is built from scratch and is only limited by technology and the imagination. The sound designer used a combination of animal sounds such as tigers, lion and bears for the imaginary creatures.

The London Symphony Orchestra performed the score and it was recorded. Low brass music and Japanese drums were used when the scenes were more violent. In the scene when Aki talks about the death of a little girl, the music composer used a piano to express the feeling of home since a lot of people took piano lessons so the sound of the piano conveys a sense of familiarity.  

 This DVD has one of the most comprehensive of special features that I have ever seen ( I think they really need to recoup their loss.) The last image I want to share is the real life inspiration for Aki. Even though the film was not very successful, Aki Ross was very well designed and she was even the first animated woman to be make the list of Maxim's sexiest woman ever.

Aki's voice actress Ming Na: