Digital's desirable women

Move over Lara Croft, Dr Aki Ross is the new cyberbabe on the big screen. KATHERINE TULICH talks to her creators, the makers of computer-animated blockbuster Final Fantasy.

Meet Hollywood's newest star - she's young, she's beautiful, she's thin, she's sexy, feminine, intelligent, strong. In fact she's perfect. She is also completely computer-generated.

Dr Aki Ross is the lead character in the computer-generated science fiction feature, Final Fantasy.

Although the film is yet to be released, images of Aki have already created a huge buzz. Men's magazine Maxim dressed her in a bikini and put her on the front cover, calling her one of the hottest females of the year. When CNN took the cover to the streets most people interviewed couldn't tell the difference between her and a real woman.

The irony is Aki, almost digitally flawless except for a few subtle freckles on her face, still needed to be "touched up" for Maxim's cover to make her look more like a glossy pin-up girl.

"We never saw her naked," says Final Fantasy's lead animator, Andy Jones. "When Maxim came to us we spent three weeks building things like a stomach, cause you never see that much skin in the film."

While it seems a little surreal that Aki is being treated like a "real" person, her creators are happy to play into the fantasy.

"It's really not in her character to show that much flesh," says Jones. "But what can we say? This is her life outside the movie. It's not Aki any more but the actress playing Aki."

There are even plans to let Aki accept other roles in future movies. "We didn't plan on it going this far, but people are coming up to us wanting to know who does her hair, what's in her makeup bag. We have started to develop a whole backstory for her," says Jones.

While Aki doesn't require trailers and an army of personal assistants, this digital diva is still quite demanding. Final Fantasy is being hailed as the first truly photorealistic film, with all human characters rather than a mixture of ogres, toys or dragons, but it's taken four years and 200 animators to develop.

"Getting realistic humans is the most difficult task," says Jones, "particularly skin texture and hair. Our character actors look more real - there are more wrinkles and beards - the more you mess it up, the more realistic it looks. Aki was the hardest because she had to look very flush and clean, with a flawless complexion. Every time we tried to mess her up, the director Sakaguchi sent her back wanting her to be more perfect. He wanted to create a movie star and this is what they really look like - flawless skin, square jaws and perfect hair."

The animators' greatest achievement was Aki's hair - 60,000 controls for each strand of hair. Every hair could be manually selected with its own gravity and friction settings. Surely, hair and makeup for a real actress would be a lot simpler.

"We are not trying to put anyone out of work, we are just trying to open up a new medium," says Jones. "It takes three or four people to illustrate a character in this movie - you have the animator, the voice talent, a motion captor actor and maybe a stunt person."

Hironobu Sakaguchi created the Final Fantasy video game in 1987. In it's ninth instalment, it was unique because each game had new characters and new settings. Final Fantasy the movie is all new again, not related to any of the characters of the games.

"What you are seeing is a convergence of gaming and film aesthetics," says Jones. "CGI [computer generated images] are being used in all films from The Mummy Returns to Pearl Harbor. But I think it is better to keep it to one aesthetic like we have.

"We are not trying to integrate live action and CGI. If you look at the end of The Mummy Returns, it turns into a cartoon. Everyone can see the difference."

Final Fantasy is set in a devastated Earth of 2065. Enemy alien phantoms are trying to drain the life energy of all living things and Aki (voiced by actress Ming Na from ER) is a strong-willed scientist on the verge of breaking the language code of the intruder aliens.

Other characters are voiced by Alec Baldwin, Donald Sutherland and James Woods. "It's related to the game in sensibility," says Jones. "It's a very deep-thinking movie. Aki is not an action star who just shoots up the bad guys like Lara Croft. She's more emotional, feminine and subtle."

So will fame go to Aki's head? Will she be booking in for breast enlargements?

"Who knows?" says Jones. "If she makes enough money out of this movie she'll be able to afford to do whatever she likes."

* Final Fantasy opens on July 26.