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Finale for Final Fantasy Studio
polar_bear` writes: "Looks like the folks who animated 'Final Fantasy' are on their way out of business. Salon has the scoop. Despite being visually stunning and fairly entertaining, it didn't manage to bring in enough bucks to cover production -- even though Aki Ross was hot enough to make Maxim's 'Hot 100' for 2001. Square Co. is looking for a buyer for the Honolulu-based movie production unit. Anybody have several hundred million dollars I could borrow?"
They should have taken lessons from Pixar.
actuly, travel costs were less! think about it, square is bassed in japan. they had both amaricans and japaneese working on the film. flying 100% across the pacific for one on one business cost twice as much as flying 50% across the pacific to do one on one business! not to mention that hawaii is a nice place to be if you happen to get off your ass and go outside :D
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
They overspent on everything...
Studios on Hawaii, the most expensive state for anything in the United States, Sure.. It's a nice perk to offer great surfing 24/7 but over doubling the cost for everything used in your operation for that one perk is plain stupidity. Yes, they did some awesome renderings.. but they could have done them in Iowa or Kentucky, or anywhere else that would have lowered their operating costs significantly would have.
nothing to see here but another example of how not to run a business.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Perhaps it was just me, but animation-wise I found this movie much more impressive than Shrek or Monsters Inc.
If by impressive you mean impressive technically, then yes Final Fantasy is light years ahead of Shrek and Monsters Inc.
Unfortunately, technical production is only one minor aspect of a movie. Plot and story comes first. Aki Ross is a lovely lady but her idea of Gaia and those ghosts simply sound too New Age to me. I didn't like it at all.
Shrek is a fun movie with good music, a compelling plot and a cast characters that are very memorable. I heard that Dreamworks's technology is capable of matching the textures of Final Fantasy but backed off from applying it because they want the movie to have the character of a traditional animation. They focused on the story rather than the technology.
I too was impressed by the CGI of Final Fantasy, it was breathtaking, and I firmly believe that this is where animation and movie making will go. But I also found out I enjoyed Final Fantasy more if I shut the audio off and concentrated only in watching Aki Ross's beautiful face and fluid movements.
They should learn a lesson from the internet and produce porn. I can attest that Aki Ross has helped me thru more than one lonely night. I can guarantee you they would have an excellent market for it in japan and most likey america.
In animation, the story is more important than everything else put together. If you don't have a compelling story, $150M of computing horsepower can't save you, they just make for a bigger crater at the end.
Look at the astonishing Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius It was made for a tiny fraction of what was spent on Final Fantasy, and it looks terrible in comparison -- but the story is fun and engaging. It's made over $76M so far at the box office. DNA, the company that made Neutron did it all with off-the-shelf commodity hardware and software, so they could do it quickly and inexpensively. Rugrats in Paris and Beavis and Butthead were similarly successful with really pretty awful animation.
I really think that the demise of Square USA's studio should be applauded rather than mourned, because it shows with unmistakable clarity that it doesn't take a hundred million dollars to make a movie; and that spending that kind of money doesn't guarantee success. Corporations can't buy success -- it has to come from individual storytellers. I can't think of a more empowering, encouraging message.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Given the talent, team and budget, my focus would have been on the quality of the animation (not the detail of the modeling) from day one. I give them a large break because they're new, its their first film, and you can see the extra hours (and dollars) went into those oh-so-luscious models. If they made a few more films, or had even more time, I have no doubt they'd get it right.
There are really very few technical constraints on the amount of detail you can put into a 3D project. You can add detail after detail until you achieve photo realism (or better.) However, with each added detail it gets more expensive to render, and those details take time. The render (and thus financial) hit you take from animating something well is no where near as huge as adding more detail, but it often take a lot more time to do it right.
So there's a little bit of a tradeoff between what you have more of, time or money. Though 3D work like what you see in Final Fantasy takes a lot of both. MoCap is often used to speed up the animation process and get fluid animation, but it works a lot better in theory than in practice. MoCap can leave a lot of cleaning up to do, you spend a lot of time tweaking things here and there to get it just right. And in some situations, perfection requires that you skip MoCap altogether.
The visual quality of movies is constantly getting better. Final Fantasy was exciting because you can see the direction that 3D is going to be heading and it makes it less hard to imagine true photo realism. But the natural advancement of technology is responsible for that increase in quality, and I've come to anticipate it.
I get excited not when I see Moore's law in effect, but when I see the people behind a project holding themselves, not their machines, to a whole new standard of quality -- like at Pixar. That's where you see real art happen.
True, the facial animation in FF was fairly poor (unless Human emotions only range from "Angst ridden" to "Stoic" and "Agressive" to "Angry". The only time that I remember a character smiling (Dr. Cid) it looked more like he was having a facial spasm. However, the body motion was leagues ahead of Shrek. The body movement of the characters (humans especially) was downright frustrating in Shrek. The princess especially - given that she's a main character I expected much more. Even if they were going for a cartoon look, instead of realism, it still came across badly. That said, I still enjoyed Shrek more - although I don't believe that it was good as most people have made out. FF just didn't have a very well realised plot. At best it was cliched, at worst it was ridiculous and/or ambigious (although it tried to pass these off as "mystical"). I'm all for films that make you think, but this one just was badly scripted. Essentially it came across as being written by a game studio, rather than a film company. I kept expecting the characters to move onto the next puzzle. "OK, we have to deal with the alien menance. But first let's get past this jumping sequence with moving platforms!".
My problem with the movie was that there was the *name* Final Fantasy, but had none of the elements of a typical Final Fantasy game. Where were the swords? Where were the airships, the "Guardian Forces" or "Aeons" (or whatever they are called), where was the magic? The Chocobos?
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
I think Final Fantasy fell flat in the method that they used for animating the characters. Traditional 3d animation studios such as Pixar and Dreamworks videotape the actors saying their lines. The actors' key facial poses are then incorporated by the lead animators into the library of expressions. When you watch Scully from Monsters Inc. smile; it looks and acts like John Goodman for a reason. This also helps the character fit the voice. The Final Fantasy team had three actors fill the shoes of one character. The voices were done by the big name actors (ie Steve Buscemi), the body motion was done with motion capture for the most part, and the facial expressions were done by the lead animators looking at themselves in mirrors. The characters fall flat, to me, as a result.
I would really like to see some sci-fi or horror brought to the screen via 3d animation but for now I think we're stuck with whatever fits on a Happy Meal. Our only hope is mid range budget studios similar to those of the 70's that produced great original horror movies such as "Phantasm" and 'Night of the Living Dead". They are the only film makers with enough freedom and money to do what they want, and do it well.
There is no graceful way to eat an egg salad sandwich.
It's not so much that Square isn't good with making characters seem human, it seems to me more like they aren't really good with the relatively short film format. Square is used to a somewhat interactive approach to plot/character development, with several hours of room to develop a world and exercise certain plot elements and devices that a movie cannot have (Though I would argue that FFX especially is almost as linear as a movie, a shame really...). Some elements of Final Fantasy games include a relatively rich world history to learn, elements of mystery that are hinted at repeatedly but take hours to fully reveal themselves, and, in general, a relatively complex plot to explore over the course of days, rather than hours as is the case of a movie. Of course, the FF movie was FF mostly in name only (no magic, no FF archetypes except Sid (chocobos, 'weapons', etc...), well, except for the graphics quality and the FF7 like view of the planet as living... Square can build beautiful worlds with great detail that can be explored in depth along with a complex plot when they have an audience willing to play for about 40 hours for a game. They are not so good at presenting a canned package that delivers everything in 90 minutes...
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