The total production time on the film was over four years. By the time the final shots were rendered, some of the earlier ones had to be redone because they didn't match anymore. Also, the software used to create them had become more advanced (and hence more detail was possible).
Dr. Aki Ross' hair is only half as dense as the average human crop, however, that still left 60,000 strands to put realistically into motion. When designing the computer graphics, a fifth of the time spent was devoted to those 60,000 hairs.
After shooting and initial animation wrapped, completed scenes were fed to Square Pictures' custom and (more or less) homemade "render farm" computer network (which consisted of 960 individual Pentium III-933MHz workstations) and processed into single frames. During this rendering process, the raw animation had the textures and extremely fine detail added by the network cluster. Each frame has twice the resolution of a high-definition TV signal and contains 10 megabytes of data.
The name of the character Dr. Sid is a reference to the Final Fantasy game series. Most incarnations of the game include a character in some fashion named Cid and in each game but Final Fantasy VII, Cid is an older, wiser character.
Chocobos (a bird creature found in many Squaresoft games including Final Fantasy) can be seen in two different spots. Once on a man's briefcase and another time on Aki's pyjamas.
The name of the Character General Hein is a reference to Robert A. Heinlein, author of "Starship Troopers".
The twin towers of the World Trade Center do not appear in any of the New York shots (except in the concept drawings on the DVD).
Aki Ross was named #87 on Maxim Magazine's "Hot 100" list for 2001, and was featured on the cover of the supplemental insert. She is the only nonexistent person to date to make that list.
This was the first Final Fantasy not scored by series composer Nobuo Uematsu, the man behind the music of all ten FF games (Excluding FF Tactics, composed by Masaharu Iwata/Hitoshi Sakimoto). His music is so loved by fans that it is often released on separate CDs by popular demand.
For fun, the producers created a music video featuring the characters (led by Aki) dancing in a Michael Jackson-like production number. This can be found on the DVD release.
Due to the poor performance of the film at the box office, Square Pictures announced the studio's "retirement" from the film business in October 2001. The studio did, however, go on to produce the short film _Final Flight of the Osiris (2003)_ in a similar realistic CGI style to Final Fantasy which played in theaters before _Dreamcatcher (2003)_ and was released as the first of a series of short films set in the Matrix on DVD entitled The Animatrix.
When Aki Ross is overlooking Old NYC, the map on her wrist computer is an actual map of the streets of New York.
The Seiko wrist watch worn by Aki Ross (known as the "wrist halo"), which produces the map of NYC, is a digital recreation of an actual Seiko watch made specifically to tie in with the movie. A different design was with numerous cosmetic changes was sold publicly.
During the conference scene where Hein and Sid debate how to kill the Phantoms. Some of the faces are in the audience are modeled on behind the scenes personnel.
The day and month shown after Aki's first dream is director Sakaguchi's wife's birthday.
The serial number 102171, that's found on the side of the Black Boa, is the birth date of one of the artists who designed and textured the ship.
The Deep Eyes Squadron has four members, a reference to the Final Fantasy game series, where in six of the ten games, you are limited to four people in your team, despite the fact that there are usually more than five characters.
During preproduction, the script went through 50 incarnations. In one such form there was a small child named Meg, who had a much larger part in the overall story. In the final version of the film the fifth spirit was drawn from a terminally ill child. This is the only reference to Meg left in the final version.
All backgrounds are hand painted.
When the movie was digitally-projected (Texas Instruments DLP), it became the first ever to include a "genuine" 8-channel Sony SDDS soundtrack. "Prototype" 8-channel soundtracks had been in use by SDDS since 1993, but the one for this movie is considered the first perfected standard of the format.
The first computer-generated animated motion picture with photo-realistic characters.
Prior to the film's release, there was speculation that the photo-realistic computer-generated "actors" would revolutionize moviemaking. There were news reports of plans for the "digital actress" used for Aki Ross to appear in another movie, or possibly be included in a live-action production amongst real actors. The box office failure of this film put those plans on hold, however a special sequence created for the special edition version of the DVD, which opens disc 2, does in fact show Aki and other FF characters interacting with real people.
In an earlier version of the script, Cid and Aki were originally grandfather and granddaughter. Aki's last name was also different: she was originally Aki Shishido. The relationship and names were changed late enough into production that many of the animators and staff didn't even know of the modification of the script until the film was nearly finished.
Reportedly, in the work print, right before Gray dies, Aki tells him that he must not die because she is pregnant with his child. The audience at preview screenings hated this plot point so much that it was out for the theatrical release.
FFTSW Pages
Games