 According to Director Tetsuya Nomura in the DVD Commentary, the  original movie was only supposed to be twenty minutes. The details  of the original story are sketchy, but from what little Nomura has  said about it, all we know is that it featured someone requesting a  message to be sent to Cloud. The message is then relayed to Cloud  through several children and, when the message finally reaches  Cloud, we learn who the messenger is. Although Nomura insisted that  he very much liked the original script, as it became the foundation  for the theme of the final result of the movie, he decided to make  the project more grand in scope only because early word of this  movie generated so much interest that a demand for the film to be  feature length eventually became so great that Nomura complied.