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In most companies, you have to justify so much of what you do - to prepare for quarterly earnings statements if the company is publicly traded or, if it is not, to build support for your decisions. I believe, however, that you should not be required to justify everything. We must always leave the door open for the unexpected. Scientific research operates in this way - when you embark on an experiment, you don't know if you will achieve a breakthrough. Chances are, you won't. But nevertheless, you may stumble on a piece of the puzzle along the way - a glimpse, if you will, into the unknown.
Our short films are Pixar's way of experimenting, and we produce them in the hopes of getting exactly these kinds of glimpses. Over the years, Pixar has become known for including short films at the beginning of our feature films. These three to six-minute films, each of which might cost as much as two million dollars to make, certainly don't yield any profits for the company; in the immediate term, then, they're hard to justify. What sustains them is a kind of gut feeling that making shorts is a good thing to do.
Our shorts tradition began in the early 1980s, when John Lasseter joined us at Lucasfilm to work on The Adventures of Andre and Wally B. Our first wave of Pixar shorts - including Luxo Jr., Red's Dream, and the Oscar-winning Tin Toy - were a way of sharing technological innovations with our colleagues in the scientific community. Then, in 1989, we stopped producing them. For the next seven years, we focused instead on revenue-generating ads and on our first feature film. But in 1996, a year after the release of Toy Story, John and I decided it was important to reinvigorate our short film program. Our hope was that making shorts would encourage experimentation and, more important, become a proving ground for fledgling filmmakers we hoped would go on to direct features someday. We justified the expense as R&D. If technical innovations could be honed on our short films, we figured, that alone would make the programme worth the money. In the end, the payoffs would be many-but not necessarily the ones we expected.
Gens Game, which was screened in front of A Bug's Life in 1998, was the first of what we came to call our second-generation shorts. It featured an old man sitting outside in the park in autumn and playing a cutthroat game of chess against himself. During the nearly five-minute film - which was written and directed by Jan Pinkava and would go on to win an Oscar - not a word is spoken other than the occasional "Ha!" that the old man utters when slamming down a chess piece with glee. The humor is located in the way the octogenarian's personality changes as he switches from one side of the board to the other. When his meeker persona beats his gloating alter ego by (literally) turning the tables, you can't help but laugh.
But here was what mattered: In addition to being a delightful film, Gen's Game helped us improve technically. Our only directive to Jan before he made it was that it had to include a human character. Why? Because we needed to get better at them. We needed to work on rendering not only the smoothly irregular surfaces of faces and hands but also the clothes that people wear. At this point, remember, because of our inability to render skin and hair and certain curved surfaces to our satisfaction, humans had only been ancillary characters in our movies. That needed to change, and Gen's Game was an opportunity to start working that out.
While we'd used R&D to justify the program initially, we soon realised that our feature films were the major drivers of technological innovation - not our shorts. In fact, in the years since Geri's Game, not a single short until Blue Umbrella in 2013 had been instrumental in our technological innovation. And while we thought at first that directing a short would be superb preparation for directing a feature - a way to grow talent - we have come to believe we were wrong on this front, too. Directing a short is a terrific education, and some of what you learn will come in handy if you ever direct a feature. But the differences between directing a five-minute short and directing an 85-minute feature are many. Doing the former is merely a baby step on the road to the latter, not the intermediate step we thought it was.
And yet, for all our faulty assumptions, the shorts accomplished other things for Pixar. People who work on them, for example, get a broader range of experience than they would on a feature, where the sheer scale and complexity of the project demands more specialization among the crew. Because shorts are staffed with fewer people, each employee has to do more things, developing a variety of skills that come in handy down the line. Moreover, working in small groups forges deeper relationships that can carry forward and, in the long term, benefit the company's future projects.
Our shorts also create a deeper value in two key areas. Externally, they help us forge a bond with moviegoers, who have come to regard them as a kind of bonus - something added solely for their enjoyment. Internally, because everyone knows the shorts have no commercial value, the fact that we continue to make them sends a message that we care about artistry at Pixar; it reinforces and affirms our values. And that creates a feeling of goodwill that we draw on, consciously and unconsciously, all the time.
Finally, we have learned that shorts are a relatively inexpensive way to screw up. (And since I believe that mistakes are not just unavoidable but valuable, this is something to be welcomed.)
Re-printed with permission from 'Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the unseen forces that stand in the way of true inspiration'. Published by Random House. Copyright@ ED Catmull 2014. All rights reserved.
CREATIVITY, INC: Overcoming the unseen forces that stand in the way of true inspiration
AUTHOR: ED Catmull & Amy Wallace
PUBLISHER: Random House
Price: Rs 699
ISBN: 9780593070109
| The authors speak |
 At Pixar, managers strive to foster a culture in which people feel free to level with one another with the goal of fuelling greatness, not tearing each other down, Catmull and Wallace tell Ankita Rai What are the key pillars on which Pixar built its model? Catmull: Candor, passion, people are key pillars on which Pixar is built. At Pixar, feedback happens throughout the day. There is a particular mechanism we use at Pixar - the Braintrust. The Braintrust, which meets every few months to assess each movie we are making, is our primary delivery system for straight talk. Its premise is simple: Put smart, passionate people in a room together, charge them with identifying and solving problems and encourage them to be candid with one another. At Pixar we ask our filmmakers to bring forth the ideas they are most passionate about. The development department then assembles high-functioning teams to support the making of each film. The belief is people are more important than ideas. We believe that the management's job is to clear the path for our employees to be creative and make it safe for everyone to do original work (which inevitably means doing something new, that might fail). Please describe the creative culture you observed at the company. Wallace: The most amazing thing I observed while helping Ed Catmull with his book, Creativity, Inc., was how this culture of self-expression improves communication. While attending several Braintrust meetings (see Ed's description above), I saw colleagues throwing themselves wholeheartedly into the job of improving each others' movies. Creating a place in which it's safe to be truly honest is harder than it sounds, but during the two years I spent wandering around Pixar, I saw how important it is. People always ask what is Pixar's 'secret.' This is the answer: At Pixar managers strive to foster a culture in which people feel free to level with one another with the goal of fueling greatness, not tearing one another down. It is inspiring to watch. Amy Wallace, Journalist & freelance writer and Ed Catmull, co-founder, Pixer Animation & president, Pixar & Walt Disney Animation Studios |
