Making Good Movies, Pixar Style
Pixar is doing something right, we all know that. I mean, 9 movies in a row that are big financial hits?
So what are they doing? Lee Unkrich, director of Toy Story 3 put it best right here.
“It’s important that nobody gets mad at you for screwing up,” says Lee Unkrich, director of Toy Story 3. “We know screwups are an essential part of making something good. That’s why our goal is to screw up as fast as possible.”
Creativity, or the act of coming up with something new and good, requires that you play around with ideas without the fear of making mistakes.
So how does that translate to the whole purpose of this blog: getting the score?
- Allowing for mistakes means giving more time for the score. Leaving only a couple of weeks for 2 hours of music means that the composer will always play it safe. Giving more time gives the freedom to experiment and explore and the start of the writing process.
- Give freedom to explore. Locking a composer within the confines of a temp track will not lead to new, creative avenues.
I can’t think of anything else right now and I have work to do, but I thought this was a great, great article with a very great message about creativity.
Movies are expensive and people get tense, and the more tense you are the less creative you get because you worry about it being good.
Pixar understands that, they allow their people to be creative and that means making mistakes. It is part of their process and the result? $500 million average gross per movie.
AND happy employees!
Hi Alain,
I had the good fortune to receive training at PIXAR and work with Don Schreiter briefly back in the late ’80s. It was clear then that they’d already figured out what the research (discussed in the video you’ve posted below) is presently showing: everyone there had what I considered an almost obscene level of autonomy. Yet they were already innovating well beyond any other organization of their type even back then and using their image technology to solve real-world problems in medicine, of all areas!
It’s a formula that works. More importantly, I don’t think this sort of environment is rare due to financial considerations. That is, it’s definitely NOT something that is incompatible with capitalism. Rather, it’s my observation (after 30+ years in software development) that the people doing the managing simply don’t think of pushing for an environment and corporate culture like PIXAR’s. Call it lack of imagination, (initiative-draining) bureaucracy or whatever - it seems to me to be a lack of vision and imagination rather than a lack of resources.