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THE
HERO AND HEROINE, Gray and Aki, float through a spaceship, looking deeply
into each otherfs eyes. He strokes her cheek before pulling her toward
him, their eyes closing just before their lips meet. Then, as they break
the kiss, her eyes flutter open, shy, misty and full of longing. It looks
as realistic as any other kiss between people with movie-star looks...
except that therefs nothing real about Aki and Gray, who only exist as
a series of ones and zeros on a computer. gNo one else is doing this,h
says Andy Jones, the filmfs animation director. gThis is the Disney of
the future.h |
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gFinal
Fantasyh promises to be visually stunning, blending the furious cyberpunk
energy of gAkirah with the classic studio style of James Cameronfs gAliens.h
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The man who would be Walt is Japanese videogame director Hironobu Sakaguchi,
whose series of role-playing Final Fantasy games is the best-selling franchise
on the Sony PlayStation. Those games were acclaimed in no small part for
their lush cinematic sequences, and by 1997 Sakaguchi was ready to take
his ideas to Hollywood. gWhen this started,h he says, h
'Toy Storyf
was already out, eA Bugfs Lifef and eDinosaurf were on the horizon.
Looking ahead, I wanted to make a difference with something that would
be fresh in three years. To do that, I had to do what was considered the
most difficult: realistic human characters.h Sakaguchi and his partners
have built a digital studio from scratch in Honolulu, hiring animators
from both Japanese anime and cutting-edge films like gToy Storyh and
gThe Matrix.h The director wonft talk ducats, but it reportedly cost
Disney $200 million to build a similar studio and hatch a comparable project,
gDinosaur.h
All the Final Fantasy games have wildly divergent characters and plots,
and Sakaguchi created yet another new universe for the big screen. In 1997
he wrote a 12-page synopsis for an action thriller about an alien invasion
in 2065. The theme he tackled-life, death and reincarnation-had been haunting
him ever since his mother passed away in the late f80s. Sakaguchi and
his producer, Jun Aida, whofd worked on a live-action version of the game
Streetfighter, approached Sony Pictures. That proved fortuitous, because
Chris Lee, then a top executive at Sony, was becoming a huge believer in
digital entertainment. gI saw a prototype for PlayStation 2,h says Lee,
now one of the filmfs producers, gand I figured wefd either get crushed
by this future or become a part of it.h But because videogame-inspired
films have had a rocky history at the box office-hSuper Mario Brothersh
bombed, but gMortal Kombath was a solid hit-it took them two writers
and 38 drafts to finally get a script that the studio would sign off on.
The task ahead was even more difficult. God may have rested on the seventh
day, but the 200-person gFinal Fantasyh team has been slaving away nonstop
in Honolulu for the past two years-and they still have another year to
go. The process goes something like this: Dialogue is recorded in Los Angeles
by Alec Baldwin, Ming-Na Wen and Ving Rhames, among others. Then a handful
of actors play out the scenes, dressed in black Spandex with silver Ping-Pong
balls affixed to key points of their bodies so that 16 special cameras
can precisely capture their movements from every angle. That process, called
motion capture, has been used widely in videogames. Filmmakers have always
considered it too unreliable for extensive use in features, but Sakaguchifs
team wrote new software to work out the kinks. gItfs like dubbing a voice,h
says actress Tori Eldridge, who plays both the heroine, Aki, and a female
Marine, gbut instead youfre dubbing a body.h The face and hand animations,
however, still have to be done the new old-fashioned way-on a PC-with programs
that let them control a character down to the throat and nostrils. gThis
is even harder than Claymation,h says Lee.
Judging from the seven-minute opening sequence, gFinal Fantasyh promises
to be visually stunning, blending the furious cyberpunk energy of gAkirah
with the classic studio style of James Cameronfs gAliens.h If therefs
a weak link, it may be the filmfs dialogue, which resembles another Cameron
flick-hTitanic.h Ordinarily, that wouldnft be a problem; after all,
who really goes to see an animated movie for the wordplay? But gFinal
Fantasyh looks so real that the synthetic dialogue sometimes rings false.
Still, itfs certain to be a breakthrough in animation. Toys, ants, bugs
and dinosaurs may dominate computerized cinema now, but suddenly human
beings have got a fighting chance.
ë 2000 Newsweek, Inc.
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