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MillimeterFinal Fantasy Lives On
Mar 1, 2003 12:00 PM, Michael Goldman
 For the Matrix prequel, Final Flight of the Osiris, director Andy Jones used facial animation tools pioneered on Final Fantasy. |
Although Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within failed at the box-office, and the company that made the film for Sony Pictures, Hawaii's Square USA, is now defunct, the project's pursuit of digital photorealism lives on. A small piece of that legacy endures on an upcoming DVD featuring nine animated prequels to the two new Matrix movies.
The DVD — The Animatrix — includes an all-CG short called The Final Flight of the Osiris, directed by Andy Jones, who was Final Fantasy's animation director and is now with Digital Domain. Osiris is the only CG prequel on the DVD; it is also the only one expected to reach theaters, currently scheduled to screen in tandem with the upcoming film, Dreamcatcher. It was also the final project completed at Square prior to its shutdown last year, utilizing many of the same proprietary tools developed for Final Fantasy, which were aimed at creating photo-realistic human characters.
Osiris, like the DVD's other Matrix shorts, is a direct homage to Japanese anime. Jones says his animation team relied heavily on Final Fantasy tools and R&D to stylize the characters for the Matrix world.
“We expanded on several things we did with Final Fantasy, particularly the facial control tools we developed for lips and eyes,” says Jones. “We have a lot more control over the eyes, for instance, than we did in Final Fantasy. But the area where we went a lot further was skin. We showed a lot more skin in this film than in Final Fantasy. For that, we developed something like a muscle system, but using poses to make the skin look like it is being stretched over muscle. This pose-based system was something we created completely from scratch after finishing Final Fantasy. Essentially, it allowed our modelers to sculpt exactly what the shape of the muscles would look like in various poses, and then apply skin reacting to those poses over the muscles.”
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