The task ahead was even more difficult. God may have rested on the seventh day, but the 200-person "Final Fantasy" team has been slaving away nonstop in Honolulu for the past two years--and they still have another year to go. The process goes something like this: Dialogue is recorded in Los Angeles by Alec Baldwin, Ming-Na Wen and Ving Rhames, among others. Then a handful of actors play out the scenes, dressed in black Spandex with silver Ping-Pong balls affixed to key points of their bodies so that 16 special cameras can precisely capture their movements from every angle. That process, called motion capture, has been used widely in videogames. Filmmakers have always considered it too unreliable for extensive use in features, but Sakaguchi's team wrote new software to work out the kinks. "It's like dubbing a voice," says actress Tori Eldridge, who plays both the heroine, Aki, and a female Marine, "but instead you're dubbing a body." The face and hand animations, however, still have to be done the new old-fashioned way--on a PC--with programs that let them control a character down to the throat and nostrils. "This is even harder than Claymation," says Lee.