Starlet Aki Ross didn't come cheap - but her halting good looks were worth every penny. For her appearance in the $115 million feature film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, which hits the big screen July 11, some 200 artists from 20 different countries worked for more than three years to get this lithe model camera-ready. Final Fantasy game series producer Square Pictures launched an f/x studio in Honolulu to ensure that the CG characters would ooze photo-realistic emotion. Although roughly 50 percent of the film's imagery is derived from motion capture, "that doesn't mean we just push a button and out comes the animation," insists producer Jun Aida (Street Fighter). "All the facial expressions were key-frame animated using video reference of actors shot during recording sessions." The science fiction saga details Earth's last stand against an invasion of alien creatures, circa 2065 (www.finalfantasy.com). And while the Columbia picture doesn't retell any one particular story from the game series' nine iterations, it's clear that the touch of Japanese developer-cum-director Hironobu Sakaguchi is all over it.
ELECTRIC WORD
Freeze-O-Matic
Liquid Audio
Welcome To The Cubicle Dome
Flesh For Fantasy
Beam Therapy
Bugs That Scale
Going With The Flow
