"The world is veiled in darkness"...

Mona



Certainly NOT in the production house of Final Fantasy!

Muqeem Khan gave a lecture on the weaknesses faced by the Final Fantasy team through a wonderful power-point full of enticing video footage as well as art story boards.

He gave a statement at the beginning of his lecture which states that “talent and technology was not enough” and noted that he will reveal the third needed “T”. Then went onto discuss three different notions: facts, memories and challenges.

Some of the facts include:

• The duration of 3 years it took to solve hair, fabric and garment perfections


• Those who worked the rendering and special effects were into allowed to use ANY real footage which included fire, and so they had to go back to the computer screen.


• 170,000,000 dollars was used for this project in 1997


• A lot of rendering took place


• A lot of work was put into various shots, but at the end when the film was completed, only a few were selected, so sometimes a lot of the hard work doesn’t end up in the final picture, but can be reused at another time.


• They had heavy machinery to intake the heavy data that is involved in these kind of effects.

I was amazed by the amount of TIME and MANPOWER it took to create the simplest image. When you watch it on the big screen you take it for granted and just choose to admire the special effects or decide to criticise its authenticity but never look into what must have happened “behind the scenes” so to speak. For example, in order to create the characters movement, actors are dressed up in black clothes and have white balls attached to them at various joints, and then 16 optic cameras are palced in different section is order to capture the balls movement and create a 3d motion on the screen, this is then taken to a different field where they create the rendering for it, which moves onto a different field where they add voiced…the results of these films and games are phenomenal.

In some way this reminds me of Labyrinth (1986) and the many people and time it took to create something so visually taken for granted.

The memories section showed footages of various members of the team (offices based in Honolulu, Hawaii) giving a small talk about their position in the establishment and what their job involves.

Finally Challenges that were faced:

• Translation between Japanese and English as those were the two main languages


• Culture clashes between a diverse team


• Upgrades causing problems for thorough development


• Different communication across different sectors of the production house, but because everyone had one single object goal it allowed them to collaborate building listening skills and the art of respecting others.

Khan had almost forgotten his last “T” as time was consuming at the start of the L&T and during Q&A I made it a point to remind him, he was glad of reminder and said that apart from Talent and Technology, Tolerance was needed. I would think that would go with everything in life.

A truly wonderful chance to have heard a great man talk about his field of work who has also worked on big films such as “Armageddon”, “Flubber”, “Deep Rising”, “George of the Jungle” and others.