Okay, you may have noticed I’ve been on a Pixar kick lately. ;) In this 27m interview released just over a week ago, Pixar and Disney Animation Studios President Ed Catmull gives some insight into the thinking and habits that have helped them release a string of successes. Some of the things I found particularly interesting:–Pixar has taken as its aim, the bold goal, of being original. (Refreshing for a movie studio actually.) But they’re not pretentious about this, and Ed comes right out to say: they realize it means they’ll always have a good chance of failure whenever they make a movie. And when asked about their process, he describes it as failing all along the way of making each one.–This “humility before the creative process”, and human-centric focus, permeates their approach. They go with the person first, not the idea – persons who have enthusiasm. As Ed says, “we’re always riding on the people.” They have the director work up three story arcs the director is excited about, and then they chose the one that the director is the most passionate about. They gather a small team of six or so around that person for two years as they flesh out that story. The first draft always sucks; always. And they know they’re working towards that “click” moment when the pieces fall into place. They realize it may never come: it’s a very real possibility to them, and they have mechanisms for resets. Resets are painful to the people, and resets are costly to the studio, but they’ve accepted that. A handful of the movies have had major restarts, often with different directors, and one movie never saw the light of day (Newt).–Within the studio, the leadership knows they’re dealing with the two sides of failure: academic and emotional. While we know academically that failure is necessary to learning and doing something new, we still have to overcome the internal angst that comes from feeling we’ve done something wrong, we’ll prove we’re not smart enough, or we didn’t work hard enough. Ed sees his job of helping the team take risks, and making it safer to be creative, by removing the barriers of fear from the creative process.–Ed describes the process of risk taking in three phases: (1) identify and accept the level of risk intended: high, low, etc.; (2) work out the consequences of that risk through internal iterations feeling your way through the process, (3) lock and load once it “clicks”, and don’t intentionally introduce new risk to the process.–Lastly, Ed cautions against drawing the wrong conclusions about success. It’s not as simple as we might like to think – don’t gloss over the messiness. Journalists writing about the success necessarily have to simplify the story, but don’t fall into the trap of believing them. Because it’s an organic system, there’s always something out of view that’s headed out of balance that you need to be alert to, and not blinded by a sense that you’ve got it all figured out now.At the beginning of the video, they share the trailer for the new Pixar movie coming out this fall, The Good Dinosaur. At the time of the video, the trailer hadn’t been publicly released and is hidden from the camera, but it’s available now online, and I’d check it out.
