Future of CG movies, why did FF fail?

#61

Thats a good point. Their in-game cinematics looked better than the movie. They tired so hard to be “photo real” that they lost all of the good stuff that they could already do.

#62

I bet the FMV guys didn’t even get a viewing of the making of TSW. It just wasn’t ready yet. It was a flop for far to many reasons, but It was a flop with a bit of life, it wasn’t horrible. It actualy can serve to be better, why? becuase now it shows the industry something, YOU HAVE TO BE BETTER THEN THAT, and if you can prove to an audiance that you ARE, then people will come and see you.

Btw, I think FF:TSW had better visuals then toystory ;), and there people pwn all of Pixars people except the old man. Pixar just doesnt’ do very good people, becuase there not nessary to the story. I guess thats okay then though.

But they can do good people, look at monsters inc, the “boo” was good, but then the other people in the film were crap. So yeah.

FF could have been amazing, however, i’d love to see the little i’ve seen of FF games, in a movie, even if its only an hour, or 45minutes long.

#63

Whats sad about FF is that they had EVERYTHING perfectly setup to make something amazing…but they blew it on the easy part…the story.

The amount of talented work that went into that dismal movie is staggering. Other than the facial animtaion, all of the tech is top notch.

#64

It’s kind of weird. I’ve been reading the forums and it seems like some of the people that never played the games like the movie. People that played the games hate or just liked the movie cause of CG.

My theory is if the movie wasn’t called Final Fantasy more people would like it. I bet lot of the people that saw this movie were Final Fantasy fans. They were expecting it to be like the games. If they called it Space Ghosts the Final Fantasy fans that saw it would of liked it. And its kind of surprising how the story sucked on the movie. Usally Squaresoft makes great stories. I wonder if they even had the creaters of Final Fantasy games do this movie. I bet the Squaresoft company from US made the movie thats why it probly sucks.

Now what I can’t wait for is there next movie. This might be what all Final Fantasy fans been waiting for. There coming out with Final Fantasy VII Advent Childern. It takes place 2 years after the Final Fantasy VII game and the movie is completly in CG. The movie is gona be about an hour. Won’t come out here in US for awhile though cause there releaseing it in Japan first. And it doesn’t come out till sometime in March 2004 in Japan I believe. I could be wrong.

#65

They don’t say CG made it fail. They said the bad CG made it fail. Which is, in a certain way, a reasonable point of view, though I don’t agree.

Dude, you just said the exact same thing.

Personally, i think the CG in FF was awesome. What i think made it fail was the combination of story and the use of CG. It wasnt the worst story in the world, but it wasnt the best story either.

What i mean by “the use of CG” is, they tried too hard to make it look realistic!!! Ya know what, if they focused so much time on trying to make the actors look real, why the hell not just use the real actors?!?

That’s one of the biggest gripes i had with this movie. Using CG was pointless IMO since the movie was all about achieving realism…or at least that’s what i got from it. That’s where the real failure lies, they just relied on amazing CG and motion captured actions when it wasnt needed, to make the $$$ and they blew it.

It just didnt make sense to me that the characters were all CG when most of they’re actions could be done easily by the normal actors who voiced them…AND DO A BETTER JOB OF IT. It just shouted out FAKE all over the place.

#66

After reading through this thread front to back, I agree with JasonOsipa’s posts and most of JackDeth’s posts (I liked Shrek).

The reasons FF:TSW failed have already been pointed out in this thread. It’s reasonable to believe that in fifteen years this movie will be the Last Starfighter of its time. Impressive, but easily forgotten.

#67

Well, this just shows that square is better off producing games than movies, hahah. In my opinion, ff games are the best rpg games I have ever played :thumbsup:

I am a fan of their games, and when the movie is shown, I was quite dissappointed: Not because of the cg, they were truly well done, but is the fact that it is not ff based. Meaning it is just another common alien vs human scenario. I was expecting it to be like the games, but it wasn’t. The name of the movie is just borrowed from the games.

I think that is the reason why the movie failed, to many other ff fans out there. The show has certainly showed the power of square in cg though, :stuck_out_tongue:

I think ff movie has taken the hard way out, compared to other cg movies like shrek, or finding nemo. They make the movie so serious that they really need a good story to back it up. If the story turns out to be too common, pple will not be interested in it. (Just look at their games. The series really have excellent stories to backup the games. I wonder who is the writer of the story? :D) Whereas other good cg movies are taking the easy way out: They are so funny movies that no one is taking them seriously, hahaha.

Well, I guess and hoped that the upcoming ff 7 advent children thingy will be a good one.

#68

i dont care if it sucked storywise
i still watch it at least once a month
im not a big movie buff anyways

#69

u cant compare toy story to FF lol they both set out to acomplish different things and the fact is CG at the momment works very well with fun animated comedys it doesnt work so well with drama, to say look at pixar they managed it is like telling someone about to climb up everest that u managed to scale ure stairs yesterday morning, totaly different! FF really doesnt have another film to compare to because it was so unique

#70

Originally posted by commy
u cant compare toy story to FF lol they both set out to acomplish different things and the fact is CG at the momment works very well with fun animated comedys it doesnt work so well with drama, to say look at pixar they managed it is like telling someone about to climb up everest that u managed to scale ure stairs yesterday morning, totaly different! FF really doesnt have another film to compare to because it was so unique

I’m sorry, but thats way wrong. A movie is a movie is a movie. It doesn’t matter if its CG, stopmotion, or live action. All movies can be compared to each other regardless of the medium it was done on because all movies have stories. And they are either good or bad stories…

FF had a bad story and that is the only reason it failed. Toy Story could have been all wireframes and done well because it had a good story. Hell, toy story could have been a high school play and done well.

Look at that Matrix “flight of the Orissois” (bad spelling)…its the same technology as FF, but it had a much better story. And guess what… people liked it. CG works fine with dramas,…if your story is good. Lots of anime are dramas, and people love thoes serious cartoons.

STORY IS KEY.

#71

Originally posted by commy
u cant compare toy story to FF lol they both set out to acomplish different things and the fact is CG at the momment works very well with fun animated comedys it doesnt work so well with drama, to say look at pixar they managed it is like telling someone about to climb up everest that u managed to scale ure stairs yesterday morning, totaly different! FF really doesnt have another film to compare to because it was so unique

AND

originally posted by wgreenlee1i dont care if it sucked storywise
i still watch it at least once a month
im not a big movie buff anyways

And you know what? No one can make you feel any different. What you think is yours to own. It may wander into “slamming” the film, but the title, and point, to the thread was a question:
“Future of CG movies, why did FF fail?”
And people are lining up with reasons, that’s all. :beer:

#72

im saying that u cant compare different genres so simply there are many reasons FF failed but to simplify it down to “pixar is better” is wrong

u cant compare lenardo da vince to jackson pollock so simply. u can say which u prefere and which most people prefere and which one has mastered their disepline better but u cant say which 1 is better than the other, that was the point i was intending to make.

The fact is FF is its own genre atm the closest it has are films like shrek and toy story but thats only because their animated too! u cant compare lotr to bruce almighty either. im not saying FF didnt fail just that right now theres no other film which has tried doing that genre of realistic believable CG

#73

another thing is…
if i want a story i’ll read a book and let me mind make the film
no two hour movie is going to beat that no matter what the affects are

i dont think the story was that bad in FF
i think it was aimed at a younger audience but some how it missed its target all together
i think they shouldve added a surreal view of humans to match the story
maybe a more futuristic veiw of humanity would provided a added touch…
you cant really capture the angnt of some of those situations in 3D like an actor couldve so there shouldve been a more feasible outlet of showing that angst or a sort of improvisation instead of trying to relay a human emotion from a 3D character…

i dont know i still like it myself,starwars is much more cliche(ish) when it comes to the later films…

#74

Technically speaking, FFTSW was an astounding achievement. Certainly the beauty of the scenes was top notch and most of the aesthetic elements of the film were spot on. The only areas where it failed were in animation and storytelling.

Here’s my list of reasons why FFTSW failed in these areas:

  1. Almost no readable facial performance in the characters. The still images of the characters still blow everything else I’ve seen away, but the animation (particularly in the faces) was extremely in-effective. I assume the investment in modeling targets and building facial rigs was low. Keep in mind the gollum rig consists of over 600 blendshapes. Facial expression is a huge nut to crack. There’s a ton of psychology behind understanding how to do it well. Few photoreal 3d characters have pulled it off.

  2. Motion capture. Technically the mocap was a big plus for this film. There was some very good mocap throughout the film. Where the problem lies is, (and this is true with any real world data capture), that if you put crap in, you’re gonna get crap out.

Too many who use mocap think you can go get cheap un-trained talent on the street to generate the performance. Most of the non action scenes in FFTSW were acted worse than the average high-school play. The characters acted with their hands so badly that I squirmed in my chair while watching it. Something tells me some of those scenes would have been much better if Alec Baldwin and Ming-Na Wen were the actual performers instead of just doing voices.

  1. Storytelling. I think had the characters connected more effectively with the audience many would not have minded the storytelling so much. But this was an example of wealth and financial capability running loose in the store so to speak. Sometimes those in charge go hell bent off in their own direction and don’t listen when those who work for them say “this isn’t gonna work”.

If you want an example, just take a look at what the production team did with The Animatrix sequence The Last Flight of the Osiris. That’s the difference a decent story makes and it was the same team, not hampered by poor management and bad story. It’s too bad they couldn’t have made a feature film with production quality like that.

Telling an eastern story to a western audience means listening to a few westerners. Also, this has been done fairly successfully before. Anime is wildly popular in the west and gaining popularity all the time, so it’s not as if anyone can blame the audience for not being open minded enough to accept Japanese stories. I don’t think FFTSW was told well by even Japanese standards.

  1. Culture clash. Japanese and American/Western cultures are worlds apart in many ways. For example, the japanese tend to mask emotion both in body language and in facial expression. Western cultures interpret such behaviors as arrogant and cold, when to the Japanese, it’s what socially acceptable. I’m no expert on this sort of thing, but the demographics of the production team (i.e. Japanese management working with a largely western production team) seem to have worked against this production in some significant cultural ways. I’m not really blaming either group for the failure, but in hindsight, this project may have turned out much nicer by either going with an entirely Japanese team, or a Hollywood team.

  2. All the “Virtual Actor” hype and debate raised audience expectations to an impossible level weeks before the film released. Tom Hanks was up in arms over being replaced by CG for cryin out loud! Square really blew it for themselves by overhyping the significance of using virtual photoreal human characters.

#75

I think there is a tremendous future for CGI films.

I thought that the CG was great. Someone mentioned facial expression… well after HULK, Yoda and Gollum I don’t think a CG actor’s performance will be as much of an issue.

What ruined FF for me was the story; but that can riun any film- CG or not.

CW

#76

Originally posted by erazal
[B]Dude, you just said the exact same thing.

What i mean by “the use of CG” is, they tried too hard to make it look realistic!!! Ya know what, if they focused so much time on trying to make the actors look real, why the hell not just use the real actors?!?

That’s one of the biggest gripes i had with this movie. Using CG was pointless IMO since the movie was all about achieving realism…or at least that’s what i got from it. That’s where the real failure lies, they just relied on amazing CG and motion captured actions when it wasnt needed, to make the $$$ and they blew it.

It just didnt make sense to me that the characters were all CG when most of they’re actions could be done easily by the normal actors who voiced them…AND DO A BETTER JOB OF IT. It just shouted out FAKE all over the place. [/B]

Dude, thats their whole point, to make the movie look as realistic as possible. Thats why this is such a groundbreaking film. They risked everything in what they believe. They tried to prove a point that they can make CG humans as close as possible (and i think they got pretty dman close, except for lips moving). Anyone can film actors in front of a blue screen. They didn’t want to go that course. If they wanted to be cheap, they could’ve filmed 70% of the movie with real actors on a real setting. But that would’ve negated their goal. Yes, they failed but its not because of the CG.

Here’s what I blame:

  1. The lip-syncing could’ve been better although it would’ve required more time and money.
  2. If only the main character had wore her hair into a ponytail, they wouldn’t have spent countless time, money creating her hair.
  3. Only thing worse than story is the DIALOGUE!! How many times did they say “Let’s get the hell outta here, people!” so lame…
#77

yeah the realism is so close until they got cross-eyed. Anyway I feel all the Square stuff are not lip sync-able, they move they shake but cant act.

#78

Making a movie just to be “groundbreaking” is the worse idea ever.

Teh CG was really good, but thier character stuff was really weak. They proved how badly CG people can be done, and set back photoreal CG moives in the mind of the public.

Only use CG when it helps to TELL A STORY! Not to showoff.

They should have just put some techno music behind it and called it “Minds Eye 34”… Then I would have enjoyed it as only eye candy…without having to hear that terrbile dialog.

#79

Originally posted by ambient-whisper
im still trying to understand how anyone can like shrek :frowning:

Shrek is my favorite CG movie ever. I have some friends who didn’t like it either, and I can’t understand it one little bit. :shrug: I can’t wait for Shrek II. :thumbsup:

#80

I didn’t like Shrek because all of the jokes were taken from other movies, and people thought it was funny because a CG cahracter was telling them. I don’t buy into that at all.

The story was so simple and obvious that you could guess exactly what would happen in the first 3 minutes. I don’t mind that ususally, but the fact that every joke was some old rehash or typical comic cliche kinda bothered me.

And Shrek 2 looks like more re-done jokes that have already been beaten to death. That dinner scene has been done about 20 times before. Some originallity would be nice…

And not to be all over Pixar’s jock…but atleast thier stories (still simple, but much less predicitble) keep you interested and enterained with some decent orignal humor. It’s not flawless by anymeans, but its pretty darn good.