Today was Day Two of the Australian Effects and Animation Festival (AEAF) where effects luminaries such as ILM, Sony, Digital Domain, etc. gave lectures to industry colleagues about their current work.

Exclusive to the seminars was a world-first exclusive sneak peek at the upcoming Final Fantasy film, from Square Pictures. The production methods and procedures were covered, giving inside information into the massive scope of the project. This was the first time that footage from the film (other than the trailer) had been seen by anyone outside Square (with one sequence having been finished only three days before).

This included more character-based scenes, showing a greater range of emotion than seen in the trailer. The facial animation is not motion captured as has been previously suggested: faces were keyframed while in most cases bodies were motion-captured. There were exceptions even here as for example, weightlessness is very hard (and expensive!) to motion-capture.

A compositing supervisor from Square Pictures explained to the Sydney audience that the daunting task (from a technical point of view) became more manageable and streamlined throughout the production. To illustrate: Aki, the main character, was the earliest and most computationally-intensive character taking a disproportionate amount of time to render compared to other characters. Even her hair took 25% of the characters total render time. The Donald Sutherland character, however, while looking even more realistic, was the last to be created and consequently a much lighter character technically.

To give an idea of the scope of Final Fantasy, the aforementioned ground battle scene was so render-intensive that far background figures had to be motion-looped and rendered as sprites, as regular flocking techniques would have crashed the entire network. Foreground figures were fully animated and mid-ground figures were done with flocking technology.

Personally, I dont think there is a need for 100% CGI main characters in film, as surely a character realistic enough not to be noticed as CG is completely redundant. At the same time, photo-real "stuntmen" are a great idea and will help in the storytelling process (no look-alike stuntmen obscuring their faces). Ironically, after an R&D experiment called "The Gray Project" in 1995, even advocates like Square backed off from the concept of a completely photo-real human. However, the sheer scope of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within made it more efficient, both technically and aesthetically, to render human characters as CG along with everything else.

The Gray Project, conceived as much to formulate a production model as a test of super-real CG characters, was a short but ambitious scene introducing Aki. Apparently it consists of a bedroom scene involving a melancholy Aki in her super-highrise apartment watching old Audrey Hepburn movies while soldiers battled an alien enemy thousands of stories below. Nothing from this will appear in the final film, and even the character of Aki has changed completely  in "The Gray Project" she is a childish redhead!

At the end of the clips, Square received rapturous applause from an appreciative , educated and excited crowd. Square were careful not to give anything away but even if it only appeals to the techno-fetishists, it looks like a big hit.