Episode 24 – 8 lessons from Pixar on building and fostering a culture of Creativity

8 lessons from Pixar on how to build and foster a culture of creativity!

Interesting to hear Pixar’s history told first-hand, through the eyes of the co-founder, Ed Catmull along with his interactions with Steve Jobs.

If you are a leader looking to learn what it means to ‘manage well’ and hearing Pixar’s story first hand, then pick this up!

1) Dailies or solving problems together

Dailies are a key part of Pixar culture. The dailies keep everybody in top form because the goal is to create the best animation possible. There are debates because the director doesn’t have all the answers – we work it out together. It is a group effort that doesn’t come naturally. Everyone wants to impress and no one wants to share their incomplete work or in conceived ideas or sound dumb in front of the director. The first step is to teach them how everyone shows incomplete work at Pixar. And how everyone is free to make suggestions and when they realize this the embarrassment goes away and people become more creative.
By making the struggles to solve the problems safe to discuss, everyone learns from and inspires each other – the whole activity becomes socially rewarding and productive.
Designed to promote everyone’s ability to be open to others by the insight that individual creativity is magnified by the people around you. The result – we see more clearly.

2) Research trips

References to other movies come up during film making. He calls out how they joke at pixar that only one star wars mention is allowed per meeting. References to other movies both good and bad are part of the vocabulary but if you rely too much on drawing inspiration your movie becomes just an ape of the masters.
We must go out and do research. When they were making a movie of a rat that aspires to become a Chef, the members of Ratatouille went to Paris to visiting Michelin starred kitchens and interviewing their chefs. An ostrich was bought into the office to help the animators who were modeling the character in the movie up.
In Finding nemo, when the plotline emerged that nemo wanted to escape by jumping into a sink with the assumption that all drain-lines end up into a ocean, a trip was arranged to the SF treatment plant and yes, it is possible is what they learnt. Many of the crew also became scuba certified. Many of these experiences are not diversion – they fuel the films development. These tiny details are what lends authenticity in the final film – they don’t know what they are lo
You will never stumble on the unexpected if you stick to the familiar – they always come back changed. Challenge our preconceived notion and fuel inspiration – they are what keeps us creating rather than copying.
It comes through even if the movie goers don’t know anything about the reality. Very few movie goers may have been in the high end kitchen of a Parisian restaurant so the chefs clogs clacking on the black and white tiles or how they hold their arms when they chop would be lost – but to the audience, it does feel right. 

3) Power of limits

Or the Beautifully shaded penny problem. Artists who work on our films care so much about every detail that they would spend hours or weeks crafting an equivalent of a penny on a night stand that you will never see. The desire for quality can get well beyond rationality. Overbuilt just to be safe. How can you tell people to care less or be less excellent. How do we set useful limits and how do we make them visible.  Finite resources – deadlines – a shifting economy – all of these external factors impose limits. The concept of a limit implies you cant do everything you want so you must think of smarter ways to work. Limits force us to rethink how we work and push us to new heights to creativity – appetite control. In any creativity endeavor there is a very long list of what we want to bring in to achieve greatness – at some point we set deadlines and prioritization. If you wait too long to do this you run out of resources. System of identifying what was possible with the given resources. Johns system consisted of popsicle sticks stuck with Velcro – each stick was a person week that a single animator could accomplish. A bunch of sticks would be lined up next to a character for easy reference – a glance will tell you that if you use this many on one you will have less on the other.

4) Integrating technology and art

Walt Disney was unrelenting in bringing in tech into animation industry – integrating tech, art and business. Balance of all three is required. Art challenges tech and tech inspires art. Art and tech play off each other. Example – way to draw on top of a projected image to communicate the views to the animators. The result – review sketch tool – digital stylus to draw directly on top of an image that saves sketches and makes them available online. This eventually became an essential tool for all directors.

5) Short Experiments

Justify what we do. Not be required to justify everything and leave door open for the unexpected. When you embark on an experiment you don’t know how this will work out – short films are used for such experimenting. Would encourage experimentation and also be a proving ground for fledging directors. They are a relatively inexpensive way to screw up. Mistakes are not avoidable but learnable opportunities.

6) Learning to see

Pixar introduced a 10 week program for new hires to use the software – Pixar University. Majority of employees aren’t artists – wanted people to understand how to heighten powers of observation. Concept of left and right brain. Drawing required shutting left mode off – suppress the part of the brain that sees an image as only an image and not as an object. Art teachers place an object upside down so that they can look at it as a pure shape and not a recognizable thing. Focus on negative spaces. Artists see more since they have turned off their brains instinct to jump to conclusions- Art classes are not about learning to draw but learning to see. With practice you can teach your brain to observe without letting judgements kicking.

Real point is you can learn to set aside pre-conceptions – not that you don’t have biases but you can learn to ignore them. As a parallel he suggests that – looks at the environment instead of focusing on the problem will give us better insights

7) Post mortems

Meeting held shortly after the completion of every movie which we explore what did and didn’t work and consolidate lessons learnt. We become exceptional by understanding ways in which we arent exceptional. Post mortems are one of the ways to do that.
○ Consolidate what has been learnt, Others to learn or challenge
○ Do not let resentments fester – provide forum to address and let go
○ Use the schedule to force reflection
○ Pay it forward
○ Ask everyone in the room to make a list – top 5 things they would do again and top 5 they wouldn’t do again. Balance negative with the positive.

8) Continuing to learn

Expanding PU’s curriculum. Sitting next to people across teams that proved very valuable – free to be open and vulnerable and communication tried. Toiled side by side – taming a lump of clay – no matter their title to respect work that their colleagues did and make us beginners again. Operate on the edge. Classes will be useful- never to turn programmers into artists – importance of every one of us to learn new things.
First and second grade drawing looked fresher than the older grades – somewhere along the line they had become more self conscious and thus become more stilted – fear of judgement hindered creativity