The Pixar Story

  "The Pixar Story"

These two clips totaling 20 minutes of a 90 minute film. You can rent the entire movie instantly on Netflix or Amazon. 

 

 

Brave Trailer

La Luna

Princess Merida

 

First Look of the Day: Courtesy of Disney Pixar France comes the first non-concept-art look at Princess Merida, the female protagonist of Pixar’s 13th feature-length film Brave — the first Pixar film to feature a female lead (Kelly Macdonald), and the first to be co-directed by a woman (Brenda Chapman).  Brave, which is set “in the mystical Scottish Highlands,” also features the vocal talents of Julie Walters, Billy Connolly, Emma Thompson, Craig Ferguson, Kevin McKidd, and Robbie Coltrane.
A release date has been set for June 22, 2012.

via the daily what

John Lasseter talks about his Hawaiian shirt collection

in case you were wondering what is in his closet...

Lee Unkrich on Win, Lose or Draw

To mark the milestone of reaching 100k followers on Twitter, longtime Pixar creative and Toy Story 3 director Lee Unkrich posted this “embarrassing” video of his 20-year-old self appearing as a contestant on the popular 80s game show Win, Lose or Draw.  Unkrich steps up to the board at 7:00. 

via the daily what

Future Pixar short 'La Luna' revealed

 

Indiewire/Thomson on Hollywood has revealed a still and synopsis from a previously unannounced future Pixar short film, La Luna.

"La Luna is the timeless fable of a young boy who is coming of age in the most peculiar of circumstances. Tonight is the very first time his Papa and Grandpa are taking him to work. In an old wooden boat they row far out to sea, and with no land in sight, they stop and wait.  A big surprise awaits the little boy as he discovers his family’s most unusual line of work. Should he follow the example of his Papa, or his Grandpa? Will he be able to find his own way in the midst of their conflicting opinions and timeworn traditions?"

Directed by Enrico Casarosa, with music by Michael Giacchino, La Luna will premiere at the Annecy International Animation Festival this June. A source informs me that Pixar finished production on it a while back, possibly as early as 2008, except for music.  La Luna is Casarosa's directorial debut. He joined Pixar in 2002 and has since worked as a story artist on Cars, Ratatouille, and Up. He is currently head of story on an unnamed Pixar film.

 

 

Lost in Scaradise

 

Courtesy of screenwriters Bob Hilgenberg and Rob Muir, a rough concept art trailer for Disney’s Pixar backup Circle 7‘s abandoned sequel to Pixar’s Monsters, Inc., Monsters, Inc. 2: Lost in Scaradise.

Innovation lessons from Pixar

Innovation lessons from Pixar

Hayagreeva Rao, Robert Sutton, 
and Allen P. Webb

Brad Bird makes his living fostering creativity. Academy Award-winning director (The Incredibles and Ratatouille) talks about the importance, in his work, of pushing teams beyond their comfort zones, encouraging dissent, and building morale. He also explained the value of “black sheep”—restless contributors with unconventional ideas. 

Steve Jobs hired him, says Bird, because after three successes (Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, and Toy Story 2) he was worried Pixar might struggle to stay innovative. Jobs told him: “The only thing we’re afraid of is complacency—feeling like we have it all figured out,” Bird quotes his boss as saying “…We want you to come shake things up.” Bird explains to McKinsey how he did it — and why, for “imagination-based companies to succeed in the long run, making money can’t be the focus.”

The piece is behind McKinsey’s pay wall, but we extract its 9 key lessons below.

Lesson One: Herd Your Black Sheep

The Quarterly: How did your first project at Pixar—The Incredibles—shake things up?

Brad Bird: I said, “Give us the black sheep. I want artists who are frustrated. I want the ones who have another way of doing things that nobody’s listening to. Give us all the guys who are probably headed out the door.” A lot of them were malcontents because they saw different ways of doing things, but there was little opportunity to try them, since the established way was working very, very well. We gave the black sheep a chance to prove their theories, and we changed the way a number of things are done here.

Lesson Two: Perfect is the Enemy of Innovation

The Quarterly: What sorts of things did you do differently?

Brad Bird: I had to shake the purist out of them—essentially frighten them into realizing I was ready to use quick and dirty “cheats” to get something on screen… I’d say, “Look, I don’t have to do the water through a computer simulation program… I’m perfectly content to film a splash in a swimming pool and just composite the water in.” I never did film the pool splash [but] talking this way helped everyone understand that we didn’t have to make something that would work from every angle. Not all shots are created equal. Certain shots need to be perfect, others need to be very good, and there are some that only need to be good enough to not break the spell.

Lesson Three: Look for Intensity

The Quarterly: Do angry people—malcontents, in your words—make for better innovation?

Brad Bird: Involved people make for better innovation… Involved people can be quiet, loud, or anything in-between—what they have in common is a restless, probing nature: “I want to get to the problem. There’s something I want to do.” If you had thermal glasses, you could see heat coming off them.

Lesson Four: Innovation Doesn’t happen in a Vacuum

The Quarterly: How do you build and lead a team?

Brad Bird: I got everybody in a room. This was different from what the previous guy had done; he had reviewed the work in private, generated notes, and sent them to the person… I said, “Look, this is a young team. As individual animators, we all have different strengths and weaknesses, but if we can interconnect all our strengths, we are collectively the greatest animator on earth. So I want you guys to speak up and drop your drawers. We’re going to look at your scenes in front of everybody. Everyone will get humiliated and encouraged together…

Lesson Five: High Morale Makes Creativity Cheap

The Quarterly: It sounds like you spend a fair amount of time thinking about the morale of your teams.

Brad Bird: In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget—but never shows up in a budget—is morale. [what’s true for a movie is true for a startup!] If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.

Lesson Six: Dont Try To “Protect your success”

The Quarterly: Engagement, morale—what else is critical for stimulating innovative thinking?

Brad Bird: The first step in achieving the impossible is believing that the impossible can be achieved. … “You don’t play it safe—you do something that scares you, that’s at the edge of your capabilities, where you might fail. That’s what gets you up in the morning.”

Lesson Six: Steve Jobs Says ‘Interaction = Innovation’

The Quarterly: What does Pixar do to stimulate a creative culture?

Brad Bird: If you walk around downstairs in the animation area, you’ll see that it is unhinged. People are allowed to create whatever front to their office they want. One guy might build a front that’s like a Western town. Someone else might do something that looks like Hawaii…John [Lasseter] believes that if you have a loose, free kind of atmosphere, it helps creativity.

Then there’s our building. Steve Jobs basically designed this building. In the center, he created this big atrium area, which seems initially like a waste of space. The reason he did it was that everybody goes off and works in their individual areas. People who work on software code are here, people who animate are there, and people who do designs are over there. Steve put the mailboxes, the meetings rooms, the cafeteria, and, most insidiously and brilliantly, the bathrooms in the center—which initially drove us crazy—so that you run into everybody during the course of a day. [Jobs] realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen. So he made it impossible for you not to run into the rest of the company.

Lesson Seven: Encourage Inter-disciplinary Learning

The Quarterly: Is there anything else you’d highlight that contributes to creativity around here?

Brad Bird: One thing Pixar does [is] “PU,” or Pixar University. If you work in lighting but you want to learn how to animate, there’s a class to show you animation. There are classes in story structure, in Photoshop, even in Krav Maga, the Israeli self-defense system. Pixar basically encourages people to learn outside of their areas, which makes them more complete. [and more creative].

Lesson Eight: Get Rid of Weak Links

The Quarterly: What undermines Innovation?

Brad Bird: Passive-aggressive people—people who don’t show their colors in the group but then get behind the scenes and peck away—are poisonous. I can usually spot those people fairly soon and I weed them out.

Lesson Nine: Making $$ Can’t Be Your Focus

The Quarterly: How would you compare the Disney of your early career with Pixar today?

Brad Bird: When I entered Disney, it was like a classic Cadillac Phaeton that had been left out in the rain… The company’s thought process was not, “We have all this amazing machinery—how do we use it to make exciting things? We could go to Mars in this rocket ship!” It was, “We don’t understand Walt Disney at all. We don’t understand what he did. Let’s not screw it up. Let’s just preserve this rocket ship; going somewhere new in it might damage it.”

Walt Disney’s mantra was, “I don’t make movies to make money—I make money to make movies.” That’s a good way to sum up the difference between Disney at its height and Disney when it was lost. It’s also true of Pixar and a lot of other companies. It seems counterintuitive, but for imagination-based companies to succeed in the long run, making money can’t be the focus.

Dreamworks makes Alma a Feature

Animator Rodrigo Blaas created the animated short Alma on his own time while working at Pixar. The film has been optioned for a feature treatment by Dreamworks.  Blaas is hired to direct Alma and co-direct Trollhunters.

If you haven’t seen Alma before, check it out above.

Critique From Victor Navone

This is a really comprehensive critique of an 

animation winner from the 11 second club.

Pixar: 25 Years of Animation

The Pixar: 25 Years of Animation exhibition is at the  

Oakland Museum of California  from July 31st to January 9, 2011. 

Spanish Buzz

Pixar Canada Promo

Pixar “Groovin’ with Ken” Viral Video

Ken Meets Barbie

Ken has a whole room just for trying on clothes!  

Every woman's dream!

Pixar Studio Stories: The Movie Vanishes

Jamie used to joke with me that the closest he ever got to loosing his work before he worked in CG was  leaving one of his drawn scenes on the subway.  he was taking it home to catch up on some work.  Yikes!

Inside Pixar's Leadership

Anyone who reads this blog knows I have the utmost respect for Ed Catmull and his approaches to leadership of a creativity company.  Ultimately he trusts the artists to do the right thing and he values people.

In this interview, I love that he talks about picking people and pushing them outside their comfort zone...so they will rise to it. I have been both sides of the picking and being picked and it's a great way to get creativity and innovation out of your employees.  

I also love how he handles post mortems.  First of all he values a post mortem as a tool to better production.  5 things you would do again vs. the 5 things you would not do again.  How awesome!  He speaks on protecting the dynamics of leadership you have built while listening to what is not working.  It's important to him to get the honest answers from his employees in order to fix the problems.  To do this, you need a safe environment or else the resentment and distrust will fester.

One of my favorite quotes from the talk is below:

"They don’t want to walk in and embarrass themselves, they don’t want to say anything stupid, they don’t want to offend anyone, so these personal pressures and responses start to emerge. So I do see it happen, and it happened fairly recently, and I walked out, and I knew they weren’t honest. So then you call them in, maybe two or three people, and say why didn’t you say what you thought. And it’s a personal thing. So we have to change the dynamic.  When we have something tricky and that’s holding things back, we have to have a four person or five person meeting, where the dynamics are different. And sometimes where things are actually going pretty well, then you want to have a room of 25 people, see how it works, and let them express themselves and have them grow. But if you have 25 people in the room some of them then start to perform, rather than participate. So there is this balance, what is the state of the thing… we need to have honesty, we want to have honesty, but honest is a buzzword. Its one of these things we hear, everyone nods their head on, ‘it’s all true’, [but] the gap between the abstractions and where people actually do it is enormous. And people fill it in with all sorts of crap."

Here are some more posts I have made of Ed's talks online

Pixar - A Human Story of Computer Animation

CG Talk at Stanford

Pixar's Superhero Shakes up Disney

I also found another quick interview with Mr. Catmull

Henry Selick Signs a New Deal to Return to Disney/Pixar

Henry Selick, the director of last year’s critical hit "Coraline," has agreed to a new long-standing deal with Disney/Pixar to both write and direct stop-motion films.

The father of stop-motion films is finally making his long-awaited return to Disney. Review St. Louis reports that Henry Selick, the director of last year’s critical hit Coraline, has agreed to a new long-standing deal with Disney/Pixar to both write and direct stop-motion films for the Mouse House. 

Furthermore, the new agreement gives the acclaimed animator the opportunity to work from his own home located in the Bay Area. Whether original or literary, Selick is entitled to work from his home studio. 

Selick’s new deal with Disney/Pixar should come as no surprise as the writer/director went to school with John Lasseter, the current head of Disney animation

. 

Selick set a new precedent for stop-motion films and made them mainstream fare with his directorial debut in the cult classic A Nightmare Before Christmas

. Although many believe Tim Burton helmed the project, Burton served as a producer to Selick’s direction. 

Selick’s latest film, Coraline, was both a critical and box office hit that garnered the director an Oscar nominee for Best Animated Feature. In addition, the film lent itself nicely to the ever-so-popular 3-D format. 

via Celebrity Cafe

More at Variety...

Pixar Cast Scale Chart

See the entire cast from Pixar in a somewhat accurate scale chart!

I am surprised Pixar themselves have never done this...