ROGERS, JAMES: FINAL FANTASY
MAN MADE MAN
Australian digi-whizzkid James Rogers has already spent over three years in
Hawaii at digital powerhouse, Square Co, working as Composite Supervisor on
Final Fantasy, the first movie to use photorealistic, or man-made humans. Rogers
talks about the next step in digital movie making to Andrew L. Urban.
Compositing is simply the process of combining different elements into one
computer image; in a computer generated movie such as Final Fantasy, everything
has to be composited. And when the central characters are also just digitally
created creatures, the task becomes supremely complex - and important.
“The other thing we do is to make it all look as though the images were
shot with a camera,” says Rogers. “So we’ll do things like adding depth of
field, or we might add some fog, or shadows. And much to the chagrin of most 3D
people, we make things look out of focus - all the time. We’re fairly
merciless with what we do to imbue things with a level of realism.
"ability to create realistic-ish human
characters"
“It’s been fascinating to see it evolve over the three years or so - to
see the technology change and our ability to create realistic-ish human
characters,” says Rogers. “And all of us working on the show have become
fairly attached to them [the characters] - so they do become actors, rather than
just figures with the voice of Alec Baldwin or Ming-Na (or Steve Buscemi, James
Woods, Donald Sutherland and Ving Rhames).
In compositing, Rogers and his colleagues “tried to emulate how we’d
treat images in alive action movie, so it’s like we had characters shot
against a green screen and we were putting them into a scene. We aim to make it
look realistic. To do this, we have to really analyse what it is people respond
to in a character.”
“the technical wizardry of interactive games”
The creator of Final Fantasy, Hironobu Sakaguchi, says “nothing is scanned
off a human and the characters are developed from our original designs and
storyboards. I have always wanted to create a new form of entertainment that
fuses the technical wizardry of interactive games with the sensational visual
effects of motion pictures. Final Fantasy takes us one step toward that dream.”
It takes an army of over 200 and enormous resources to make a movie like
Final Fanatsy: in excess of A$100 million, in fact. At the heart of it are the
photorealistic humans. And at the heart of the process, says Rogers, is
compositing. “Previous movies made in full CG, for example Pixar’s Toy
Story, didn’t really have a compositing section per se. But we can do things
in 2D that are basically a cheat…manipulating the images quickly. In 3D it
takes a lot more computer power and it’s less efficient.”
The big question for everyone is how human-like can these computer generated
humans look? And sound? And move? Looking at early footage, it seems like an
impressive achievement; while it is evident that the characters are not human,
they movie with the fluidity of youth, boast healthy skin tones and express
emotions as well, or better than, most animated characters (like animals in
Dinosaur or Bugs Life, say) in recent times.
"themes of the environment,
spirituality and human complexity"
But what do these compumans do? Final Fantasy is not just a showcase for
digital design; it is the evolution of Hironobu Sakaguchi’s internationally
successful Final Fantasy videogame created in 1987. The ninth instalment was
released in 2000; it is sold by the millions and each new adventure feature an
original cast. So does the movie - it isn’t based on any of the existing
games. It is a futuristic sci-fi thriller set in 2065, when Earth is a scarred,
crumbling shell, victim of mysterious alien phantom forces. “Aki stands alone,
her eyes revealing inner conflict…” say the production notes.
Aki (voice of Na) is the young woman who believes in protecting Earth through
harmony and balance; in an opposing camp, a militant General (voice of Woods)
insists on an immediate and severe solution - a weapon of mass destruction. The
movie tries to fuse themes of the environment, spirituality and human
complexity, in an action driven adventure.
But if we can now generate humans at will out of our computers for the
purposes of screen entertainment, what’s next? “That’s a really good
question,” says Rogers, “and one that’s difficult to answer. It’s hard
to know, but the whole CG industry is keen to make more and more realistic human
figures. And people say why, but it comes down to being a challenge. Everyone in
the world is familiar with human figures. Everyone’s an expert in recognising
a human figure. We’re all very tough critics. So the challenge is to go beyond
inanimate objects in a credible way.”
Yes, but how far can we go? In Final Fantasy, two compumans actually kiss;
will the next step be a movie in which they make love? How far away is that? “I
don’t know,” says Rogers, “but I wouldn’t like to speculate…I’d
imagine it’s not that far away.”
Published May 31, 2001
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