 Square accumulated four SGI Origin 2000 series servers , four <unk> systems , and 167 Octane workstations for the film 's production . The basic film was rendered at a custom render farm created by Square in Hawaii . It housed 960 Pentium III @-@ 933 MHz workstations . Character movements were filmed using motion capture technology . Animator Matthew Hackett stated that while motion capture was effective for many of the scenes , in others animators still had to add movements manually . Hand and facial movements were all done manually . Some of General Hein 's facial features and poses were based on Hackett . As animators did not want to use any actual photographs in the film , all backgrounds were done using matte paintings . 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 put in a combined 120 years of work on it . 
