Final Fantasy: The Movie

Epiphani writes: "It's been known for quite some time that Squaresoft was in the process of making a full length CG movie, however I never imagined it would be like this. 'Next to the beautiful Pacific Ocean, Square has selected Harbor Court in downtown Honolulu as the home to more than 150 computer graphic artist from all over the world, including Hollywood, Tokyo and Europe. There, surrounded by state-of-the-art computers and software programs, artists are able to transform their vision into reality set on a computer screen.' Square has really outdone themselves this time, with an amazing voice cast and unbelievably realistic CG -- this one is sure to be a hit considering Square's emphasis on plot. Be sure to check out the featured trailer (req. quicktime)."

Comments

IF it ever comes out...

[Godai]

Last thing I heard about this movie was that it was 2 years late and a few million over budget. Sure, the scenes look nice, but it seems it's taking them 6 months to do that single, break-taking scene. Uh, that is not good. Another thing: I like - rather, used to like - the Final Fantasy series quite a bit, but as much I think Square's got some killer CG artists, I can't see this flick doing all that well in North America. There are really only two audiences for this movie: fans of CG (geeks) and FF fans. Are there enough fans betwen the two groups to make Square back its investment? I'm not sure...
Wood Shavings!

Can't wait, but...

[Zone5]

While I'm eager to see this movie, and I'm sure many other geeks are as well (be they anime geeks or FF geeks), I'm not sure how the general North American movie-going public will accept it. Let's face it, whenever a movie like Forrest Gump wins Best Picture while Fight Club is almost univerally hated, you have to question the average person's taste and capacity to enjoy something different. Square has always done a great job with warped plots, which should make this movie different enough to trouble the average nimrod who laid out $10 to see a pretty animated film expecting another Toy Story.

I'd like to know more about their Iron

[Sawbones]

In reading the bits and scraps I've found about the movie for the past year or so I've only ever managed to find two interesting tidbits.

1) The rendering horsepower was/is supplied by something like 2 full floors of sgi onyx boxes. That even with that it was limited to something like a second of film rendering per day and that they anticipated technological advances to be able to render the entire film in time.

2) Square developed a few new algorithms to help with animation. Namely one for hair blowing in the wind (sort of interesting) and the way cloth folds and bends as a "actor" moves (very interesting).

Anyone else with unsubstantiated rumor/facts? :) Or better yet, a more indepth site for details? :)

Re:I'd like to know more about their Iron

[hkon]

In the credits for "A Bugs Life" I noticed that Pixar uses Sun Microsystems for rendering the final theatre quality version, however they use SGI workstations. I would imagine that Squaresoft has a similar setup. Pixar probably has several fully loaded Sun Enterprise 10000 machines that do their rendering.

You would think so, but I guess they got a better deal on E4000 servers, as they used 100 of them for A Bug's Life. See http://www.sun .co m/smi/Press/sunflash/9812/sunflash.981215.2.html for more info.
Since then, they've got a new one, tho. 120 Enterprise 4500s, which are $223,000 EACH.... http://www. sun .com/smi/Press/sunflash/1999-08/sunflash.990810.2. html

Someone mentioned that he thought the Final Fantasy people used Onyxes, but that'd really surprise me, since the Onyxes usually are used for realtime graphics things, and not rendering. It would seem kinda pointless to put a really high-end graphics system in a box that's gonna do cpu-intensive things only. Unless, of course these boxes can use some of their graphics hardware for rendering nonrealtime stuff as well. You'd probably want to have one Onyx to see quick previews without having to push it through your rendering farm, but that won't be production-level quality.
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The best thing about CGI.

[Julius X]

I've seen the trailer for this, and I have to admit it looks beautiful. Even though, part of me is itching to say that it still doesn't look completely real.

The fact is that CGI movies shouldn't look real. There is a certain magic that CGI can create in a film that makes it look...perhaps more than real... CGI can allow things to look real enough, but then allow us to go beyond what is actually possible, and then take us there.

That is what I'm looking forward to about Final Fantasy. A movie that doesnt even pretend to be a cartoon, and a film that will take us past where reality has ever gone.

-Julius X

Re:it's gonna be wonderful!

[webrunner]

Okay, let's try this again. Hopefully it'll actually work this time.

It's a bit complicated, but here's a little chart:
Japan: Final Fantasy USA: Final Fantasy.
Japan: Final Fantasy II USA: Never released.
Japan: Final Fantasy III USA: Never released.
Japan: Final Fantasy IV USA: Never released.
Japan: Final Fantasy IV Easytype USA: Final Fantasy II
Japan: Final Fantasy V USA: Final Fantasy V (HORRIBLY TRANSLATED) in FF Anthology
Japan: Final Fantasy VI USA: Final Fantasy III, and VI in FF Anthology
Japan: Final Fantasy VII USA: Final Fantasy VII
and the rest are the same.

Also, here are some other "FF" titles that are interesting.
USA: FInal Fantasy Mystic Quest Japan: Final Fantasy USA. (This is much like Mario Bros 2)
USA: Final Fantasy Adventure Japan: Seiken Densetsu
USA: Secret of Mana Japan: Seiken Densetsu 2 (yes, SoM is a sequel to FFA)
Japan: Seiken Densetsu 3, USA: Not released, buty ou can get a translated version off the net.
USA: Legend of Mana Japan: Seiken Densetsu: Legend of Mana.

Seiken Densetsu means, essentially "Legend of the Holy Sword" by the way, as a reference to the Mana Sword.

Final Fantasy Legend 1, 2, and 3, in the USA were originally "SaGa", which made it's way to the PSX in SaGa Frontier.

FF Tactics is called FF Tactics in both Japan and North America.

As for FF Movie, it's not really an FF movie - it's not really Final Fantasy in any sense, they're just using the name a bit more freely. But it will probably still really really kick ass, anyway. It's worth 7 bucks just to see the effects of 3D realism on a crowd.
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More FFM Pictures

[dew]

There's one at Ming-Na's website (she's one of the lead vocalists) not on the main site (picture), another from Animation Artist herepage for the movie).

The dmoz category for the movie is here with a fair number of links to sites about the movie (like the GIA).

David E. Weekly

Other places to get the trailers

[Hadean]

In case you haven't seen any yet (and you can't get on the site), you can get them here and here.

(hmm.. the trailer is months old... how's that new?)

Common Lisp used in Final Fantasy

[lispbliss]

just had to point out that Square used Allegro Common Lisp for the movie. The link below has a nice discussion about why they chose Common Lisp and has a picture of the cool photo realistic computer graphics they have in the movie. http://www.fra nz. com/success/customer_apps/animation/squareusa.php3

Real time on a PS2

[SIGFPE]

If you were at SIGGRAPH 2000 you may have seen a shot from this movie running *real time* at HD resolution on a Sony box consisting of 16 PS2's running parallel in one box. It was pretty awesome! The camera was movable by the viewer and the image quality was pretty much the same with wonderful lighting, texturing and hair dynamics.
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Re:QuickTime Rant

[Chemical]

I completely agree. I cannot understand how Quicktime became the standard for Internet video. The software is terribly bloated. The codec is overly proprietary. And you must use Apple's software to view movies, which is only available for Mac and Windows, with apparently no plans for supporting more platforms. The absolute worst part about it is that Nagware viewer. Every time I want to view a QT movie, I gotta see that goddamn nag banner, unless I want to pay to "Upgrade" to QT Pro. The Pro version, by the way, is a total ripoff as it simply adds a few features that Microsoft includes for free in WMP, and it still sucks.

I cannot understand how something as open as the internet has adopted, with wide open arms, something as closed as QT. Maybe one of you could enlighten me because I can't figure it out. Does QT offer better picture quality? Not as far as I can tell. It looks no better than MPEG1. In fact Mpeg movies run significantly smoother on my system. Is the sound quality better? Maybe, but I can't tell. Better compression ratio? Not by a long shot. Divx;) offers nearly DVD quality video, much better video quality than QT, in a much smaller file. RealVideo offers very high compression ratio, and the picture quality is still fairly good. I know RealVideo very proprietary too, but at least their player doesn't constantly nag you to upgrade, supports more than Mac and Windows, and is actually good.

If anyone cares to explain to me how Apple keeps their stronghold over internet video, please feel free. I would really like to know. I pray for the day when webmasters see the errors of their ways and start using Mpeg.