Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within - Production

Production

Aki Ross's voice actor, Ming-Na Wen, was selected by Sakaguchi based on his decision that she fit Aki's personality. Ming-Na, who found the role via her publicist, said she felt like she had given birth with her voice to the character. She noted the role was not without its difficulties; especially working without the presence and spontaneity of real actors.

"At first it was very lonely sitting in that booth and eerie to see (Aki's) lips move and my words coming out, but slowly I began to enjoy my time with Aki, and I became attuned to her."

She gradually accustomed herself to this feeling, commenting that the voice-acting work did not take much time, as she would just go into the studio "once or twice a month for about four months" with no need for make-up and costuming sessions. The workload was so light it did not interfere with her acting commitments in the television series ER. Whilst Square ruled out any chance of a sequel to The Spirits Within before it was even completed, they were considering using Aki's character in other films. Ming-Na has said she would be willing if asked to continue voicing Aki.

Square accumulated four SGI Origin 2000 series servers, four Onyx2 systems, and 167 Octane workstations for the film's production. The basic film was rendered at a home-made render farm created by Square in Hawaii. It housed 960 Pentium III-933 MHz workstations. Animation was filmed using motion capture technology. 1,327 scenes in total needed to be filmed to animate the digital characters. The film consists of 141,964 frames, with each frame taking an average of 90 minutes to render. By the end of production Square had a total of 15 terabytes of artwork for the film. It is estimated that over the film's four year production, approximately 200 people working on it put in a combined 120 years of work.

From early on, it had been decided that The Spirits Within would be filmed entirely in English. In order to keep the film in line with Hironobu Sakaguchi's vision as director, several script rewrites took place, most in the initial stages of production. Sakaguchi stated he was pleased with the film's final cut, saying he would not have changed anything if given the chance. The film had high cost overruns towards the end of filming. New funds had to be sourced to cover the increasing production costs while maintaining staff salaries. The film's final cost of $137 million blew out from an original budget rumored to be around $70 million.

Surprisingly for a film loosely based on a video game series, there were never any plans for a game adaptation of the film itself. Sakaguchi indicated the reason for this was lack of powerful gaming hardware at the time, feeling the graphics in any game adaptation would be far too much of a step down from the graphics in the film itself.