[rescue] recommended: Final Fantasy movie

[Shawn Wallbridge]

I guess when I mean the lip syncing being 'off' I mean that the characters
didn't look like they were talking properly. I thought the facial movements
while the characters were talking were unrealistic, they weren't moving
their lips/jaws enough.

For someone that hasn't played any of the games, I felt parts of the story
were missing. I can't even really pinpoint them, but it just felt
disjointed.

I was definately impressed with the characters, Aki was great. Some of her
shots were so lifelike it was weird (you know it isn't real, yet it looks so
real). I plan on going to see it again later this week, so my opinion may
change.

As for free software, I don't know. We tried using BMRT for some stuff at
work and it just couldn't handle what we needed and it wasn't free, so we
couldn't pay a programmer to improve it. Now we are looking at paying big $$
for PRMan or Renderman :-( If we had the time and the $$ it would be
interesting to start work on an OS renderer, but we need a top quality
renderer NOW. I think a OS project to build a high end renderer would be
great, we would probably hire someone to contribute (sure beats $5k/cpu
licensing fees), but I haven't heard of one.

shawn




-----Original Message-----
From: rescue-admin at sunhelp.org [mailto:rescue-admin at sunhelp.org]On
Behalf Of joshua d boyd
Sent: Sunday, July 15, 2001 12:26 AM
To: rescue at sunhelp.org
Subject: Re: [rescue] recommended: Final Fantasy movie


On Sat, Jul 14, 2001 at 08:36:18PM -0400, dave at cca.org wrote:
> swallbridge at home.com writes:
>
> >I saw it Wednesday at the theater and I would have to agree with Bill. It
> >was amazing visually, but as a movie it had issues.
>
> >The biggest complaint I had about the movie was the lip syncing. It was
> >really bad in some places. Definitely something to see if you are into
> >computer graphics.
>
> So.... it would have been better as a screen saver than as a movie?

Alright, I just got back from watching the movie at the local
megaplex.  First, the lip syncing was definately off at times.  It was
only really bad once in my opinion though.  I was really surprised.  I
would have thought they would have caught that.

Now, I thought that the story was good and well written.  This seems to
put me in direct opposition with the net as a whole, but that's what I
thought, and I'm sticking to it.  The pacing was nice.  Aki was
excellent.  I liked that they had the guts to make her such a subtle
character.  And they really pulled of the subtleties of her expressions
well.  I was worried about how well they would do at the little things.

As to the visuals, well they were nice.  I think that this movie further
validates CG as a form of artistic expression in a way that
"cartoony" movies like Shrek and the Pixar fare don't.  If they could just
get the price down on doing such stuff, it probably would result in a lot
of really great movies from more independent sources.

Of course, this brings up one thing I think about free software.  There
are a lot of free software products out there that say they want to be
professional level Animation, modelling, whatever packages.  The reality
is that most of them don't even make it to prosumer levels like Caligari's
Truespace.  I suspect that a large part of the problem is that the
programmers never used pro-level stuff, and if they did, they probably
didn't understand what was so great about it.

But, if free software really wanted to prove that it was better than
commercial ware, then they should focus on first making things easy to
animate (and I mean Character Studio simple is just the first step), and
then making high end features like hair and cloth easy to work with.  In
other words, they need to find a way to make high end features not just
cheaper (software license wise), but cheaper to use (meaning work gets
done faster, and can be done by people with less skill, even though it
might not be as good with them).  I think that the people who are
exploring using things like the quake engine as an animation medium might
be on the right track.  But, they only support windows clients, so I can't
see for myself.

PS, they showed a new Monsters Inc trailer before FF.  It was really
great.

--
Joshua D. Boyd
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