by Alison L. Roberts

I recently had the opportunity to interview Andy Jones, who served as animation director for Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. What follows is an edited transcript of that session. (Edited meaning, I can only type so fast! ;-)

Dr. Sid

ALISON ROBERTS [ROBERTS]: Traditionally, most animated features — especially in the U.S. — are extremely kid-friendly. Final Fantasy seemed to be geared toward a different target audience. How did this affect production?

[ROBERTS]: What were your initial goals when you began work on Final Fantasy? Did they evolve as your work progressed? How?

[JONES]: We started out to make an aesthetically pleasing look to the characters. But the closer you bring it to reality. . . I was concerned it might look scary or weird. We were trying to develop a style that would make the characters engaging to the audiences.

[ROBERTS]: What was the biggest challenge you faced during the course of the production? How did you overcome it?

[JONES]: I think motion capture, for me. . . [it] was something I hadn't worked with extensively before. It wasn't a problem, but I was worried about it. We wrote a lot of tools to overcome it and allow us a lot of freedom to use it or not. It turned out to be a really powerful tool. In the beginning, I thought it might be difficult to use, but it turned out really well.

[ROBERTS]: Which characters were the easiest and most challenging to create and animate?

[JONES]: I think the most challenging was Aki, the one character with the least amount of flaws. We weren't able to give her a lot of flaws, where, for example, Sid had more flaws, and it added to the reality. The more details we put in there — age spots, pimples, hair. . . We were able to get away with more with Sid than we were with Aki.

[JONES]: He was very involved in the initial storytelling phase, and pretty well involved in the layout (the middle ground), the first story boards, the 3-D camera moves and the rough blocking of characters. How the shots would look.

[ROBERTS]: How did your role on Final Fantasy differ from your previous production roles in Titanic and Godzilla? What are the differences between doing CG effects for a live-action film versus a fully CG-animated film?

[JONES]: The fact it was fully-animated definitely attracted me to this movie. I've always wanted to work on something like this and push the technology we had and push the animation. . . do something besides what Disney and Pixar were doing. Both Godzilla and Titanic were doing realistic animation — although Titanic had no facial expressions and was mostly gross body movement. With Godzilla, it was a creature. . . no one knows how he is able to do what he does. Everyone knows about how humans move, so we had to concentrate on subtlety and detail. It allowed us to put cameras in different areas and change shots on the fly — change any angle at any time. It gave us more freedom and control over the shot, but it also made it difficult to change some things that were already set. Overall, it was great. . . a lot of fun.