Post 6: Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, created by Square Studio is the fist photorealistic animated feature film. This film also hold the record for the most costly video-game adaptation. For the making of this film, Square Studios used workstations with some of the most advanced processing capabilities for computer animation at the time. The original budget for the film was 70 million, but with cost increases toward the end of the production, the entire film ended up costing Square Studio 130 million. Of which, the film only made back 88 million at box office.

The basic film was rendered at a home-made render farm created by Square in Hawaii. It housed 960 Pentium III-933 MHz workstations. Animation was filmed using motion capture technology. 1,327 scenes in total needed to be filmed to animate the digital characters. The film consists of 141,964 frames, with each frame taking an average of 90 minutes to render. By the end of production Square had a total of 15 terabytes of artwork for the film. It is estimated that over the film’s four-year production, approximately 200 people working on it put in a combined 120 years of work.

The film was a box office flop and not a very talked about or memorable movie. The importance of this film is that it demonstrated the shear power of computers to generate a hyper-realistic virtual world. It also showed how much computer animation technology had advanced in less than 10 years since the first feature-length computer animation, Toy Story.

Surprisingly for a film loosely based on a video game series, there were never any plans for a game adaptation of the film itself. Sakaguchi indicated the reason for this was lack of powerful gaming hardware at the time, feeling the graphics in any game adaptation would be far too much of a step down from the graphics in the film itself.