Aki Ross - Creation and Design

Creation and Design

Aki Ross is a fictional character created by Hironobu Sakaguchi for Square Pictures under Square, for the purpose of use in their debut film The Spirits Within. The model designed for Aki was designed to be as realistically human as possible, with Sakaguchi commenting in an interview "I think it's OK to look at Aki and be convinced that she's a human." Each of her 60,000 hairs was separately and fully animated and rendered, at a render farm consisting of 960 Pentium III-933 MHz workstations that took 1.5 hours to render each frame, with the model estimated to be made up of around 400,000 polygons. Sakaguchi intended to have Aki be Square Picture's "main star", noting intentions to use her in later games and films by Square and the flexibility of being able to modify aspects of her such as her age for said appearances.

Aki's appearance was conceived by lead animator of the project, Roy Sato, who created several conceptual designs for Sakaguchi to consider and then used the selected design as a guide for her character model. During her development, he altered the model to appear more intelligent looking, shortening the hair and removing makeup from what he perceived as a "supermodel" looking character in favor of an appearance that would "convince people that she's a scientist." In an interview, Sato described actively trying to make her appear as realistic as possible, making her similar to himself in many ways that he could in terms of animation including elements of his personality through facial expressions, though noted "she's a lot cuter than me".

Ming-Na found the role via her publicist and said she felt like she "has given birth with voice to a character" and that it was a little "eerie". She added that it was difficult to work without the presence and spontaneity of real actors; however, she gradually accustomed herself to this feeling, and noted 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, continuing to play in the television series ER during the works on the film. After completion of the film, Ming-Na noted that she would be willing to continue voicing if she were asked to.