“The Most Valuable Thing I Learned at Pixar: How to Fail”
Time once again to dip into my obsession with Pixar Animation Studios. Several years ago, I interviewed Mary Coleman, Senior Development Executive at Pixar. The conversation offers a terrific insight into the story-crafting process at arguably the most successful movie studio in existence today: 16 out of 17 movies which debuted at #1 in box office revenues. Their movies have garnered 26 Academy Awards, 7 Golden Globes, and 3 Grammy Awards, and 7 of their movies are in the IMDb Top 250 Movies as voted by movie fans.
If I had to guess, I figure over the years I’ve written perhaps 50–60 posts on Pixar. So when I noticed someone had posted a comment in my interview post with Mary Coleman… and the individual in question said he had worked at Pixar for 8 years… and he had written a blog post of his own about one key to the Pixar story process, I reached out to the writer — Mike Sundy — to see if I could feature some excerpts from his post and he agreed.
The piece is titled “The Most Valuable Thing I Learned at Pixar: How to Fail”. The whole post is worth reading, but here is a taste:
At Pixar, we constantly attempted to identify failure, correct weak spots, and not get too complacent. This started from day one. On my orientation several years ago, they walked me (an IT guy) and the other employees starting that day (barista, software engineer, etc.) into the beautiful Main Theater and sat us in row six, where the directors sit. They told us “you’re all filmmakers now.” And they meant it. We, along with the other thousand or so folks who work there, were charged with identifying failures in the films (and in the company) and then “plussing” them. Plussing = making it a little bit better. The entire company had a voice and we were encouraged to e-mail our notes directly to the producer. Pixar doesn’t make films better than anyone else. They just make them over and over until they get them right. We averaged roughly 8–9 low-res visual drafts of the films (in storyboard form called “story reels”) over the course of the several years it takes to make each film. And the early versions of most of the films are frankly terrible. This includes Woody being a jerk (see video below) in the early reels of Toy Story. The films improve dramatically over those 8–9 rounds of screenings. By the time we got to the final iteration after years of effort, it was usually working well.
The failure starts from the very birth of the film. The simplified version of how a film starts is that a director or story artist comes up with three personal ideas and pitches them to John Lasseter. John picks one of the three and tells them to develop that. Right off the bat, there are two failed ideas. After that, there are hundreds of “failures” as ideas about the story are pitched and discarded. Then the story artists draw tens of thousands of temporary boards for the reels — that’s tens of thousands of “failures.” The Braintrust (a group of peer directors and writers) weighs in with their opinions and blows up the reels again. The beleaguered director and his/her team are constantly being confronted with the fact that the film’s not good enough yet. They collate the useful feedback, make some decisions, and then make it better. And that’s just the story side of it. There are daily/weekly reviews of animation and other production elements where small teams analyze, find weak spots, and plus them. It’s a grind toward greatness.
Sometimes a film will even make it to production and then get canned. That’s an expensive failure. But it’s more important than putting out a subpar film.
In a sense, Pixar displays and celebrates their failures. Their art galleries are full of concept art, character design, environment design, and gags that didn’t directly make it into the movie. But there’s a beauty in the process of discarding, and out of those lovely “failures” the final film emerges.
When Mike says Pixar “celebrates their failures,” consider this: What other movie studio would make public the famous Black Friday test clip of the first bad iteration of Toy Story in which Woody comes across as a real jerk:
Mike, who is a writer himself, goes on to talk about how he figures failure into his own creative process. As I say, the entire post is well worth reading which you can do here.
There are a lot of factors which can derail creative effort let alone productivity and fear of failure is one of the most common and powerful dynamics. So when a company like Pixar embraces failure, we should take a lesson from that.
We are going to fail. What matters is what we do with our failures.
What do you think? How do you deal with writing failures? Do you find fear of failure to stymie your creative output? And you Pixar fans, what do you think about their “celebration” of failure? I invite you to hit Reply and join me in comments to continue the discussion.
Blog: http://mikesundy.blogspot.com
Twitter: @mike_sundy
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