When the task at hand is to generate excitement for Square Enix’s much anticipated release of the Final Fantasy XVI videogame, the trailer in question inherently has to be visually ambitious. Successfully realizing those ambitions were ad agency Anomaly LA, director Diego Contreras of production house Love Song, and visual effects studio Blacksmith as reflected in part by the three-and-a-half minute film–titled Requiem–being selected to headline SHOOT’s Top Ten Visual Effects & Animation Chart for the second quarter of 2023.
The film–which lives on YouTube–is a prime element in the “Fate Will Fall” campaign. Requiem features game protagonist Clive wandering through Valisthea, eventually having to combat Ifrit, the Dark Eikon within him. Clive also battles Titan Lost and Garuda, among others–the confrontations ranging from a wrestling match to a shoot ‘em up confrontation. Like the game, in which players take on the POV of Clive, so too do viewers of this Requiem trailer.
Among the artisans from Blacksmith entrusted with bringing Requiem to fruition were VFX supervisor/lead compositor Ben Kwok, VFX supervisor/CG lead Tuna Unlan, and compositor Yebin Ahn. SHOOT garnered observations from each regarding the challenges that Requiem posed to them, as well as their reflections on the overall project.
Kwok shared, “Requiem was an enormous undertaking, but it was exactly the type of challenge we wanted to dive into. From the moment we read the first script and then the treatments, we started gathering reference and generating concepts–the subject matter was right up our alley, and so we designed a lot of the effects shots with the mindset of ‘I’ve always wanted to work something like this into a shot.’
“I’d say that the biggest creative challenge for us was the sheer scope and scale of the job. In the script we follow our hero on a journey across this fictional land, with these epic vistas and scenery. We have a 400m tall crystal, a giant monster made of fire, all these castles and fireballs and we had to put all of it in there, make it feel seamless but also otherworldly. We had a lot of things to get right.
Kwok continued, “We had been working on the monster shots right up until the shoot, so we knew exactly what we had to capture on location, and then we were able to hit the ground running once we got back to the studio. Our director Diego was hugely collaborative and there was a lot of trust there for us to make it look cool, and follow our instincts–which made the whole process, while gargantuan, extremely enjoyable. We had a great time working on this one!”
Compositor Ahn related, “The biggest challenge for me was compositing the last Ifrit shot. Besides dealing with multiple heavy renders, it didn’t even have a live action plate to get any visual cues either to make a fantastical game character to realistically exist in our world. The team and I pulled a lot of visual references from nature footage such as hot volcanoes, lava, big scale wildfire, etc. Watching movies with both nicely executed VFX shots and bad VFX shots was resourceful because I could learn what and what not to do. Towards the end of the project, there were multiple times I felt like I hit a creative wall. But I had the best team I could ask for help. Having different sets of experienced eyes and perspective to look at my work always gave me a breakthrough and I could continue finessing the shot to a final stage. Compositing full CG shots actually ended up giving us nice creative freedom in shaping some shots to our liking, and it was quite a fun run.”
VFX supervisor/CG lead Unlan shared, “When you have been given a task to create a live-action adaptation of a game franchise, especially one that is as giant as Final Fantasy, there were naturally many challenges we had to overcome, both creatively and technically. You are only given a certain amount of screen time, as well as artist time, but so much great content you could potentially put in to establish the Final Fantasy world, which includes so many amazing character designs, environments and FX. It was overwhelming to be selective about which assets to use where and how much we should see of them. There were a lot of different ingredients to consider while putting together a shot and the balance was delicate. This was especially difficult while working on the Infernal Eikon, Ifrit. The natural instinct is to show off this monster from every cool angle but for the context of our story, less was more. Perhaps one day we will see more of Ifrit?
“We wanted to ground Ifrit in some sense of reality which came with both creative and technical challenges,” continued Unlan. “We wanted to portray the feeling that you are about to jump into this hell fire to face this ominous fiery beast.
We discussed many ways to make Ifrit feel massive and as fiery as possible without going too Hollywood with the picture. We went through different stages of R&D with FX and Look Development to see what kind of combination worked for our sequence. At the end, we had some stunning smoke simulations that worked really well with our textural look development on Ifrit to make him feel smoldering hot.
For the full second quarter Top Ten Chart, click here.
