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Business News/ News / Business Of Life/  Extract | Creativity, Inc
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Extract | Creativity, Inc

The co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios on what it takes to foster creativity

Creativity, Inc.—Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand In the Way of True Inspiration: By Ed Catmull with Amy Wallace, Bantam Press/Random House, 341 pages, ₹699Premium
Creativity, Inc.—Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand In the Way of True Inspiration: By Ed Catmull with Amy Wallace, Bantam Press/Random House, 341 pages, 699

NEW DELHI :

Stories of creation

There are many blocks to creativity, but there are active steps we can take to protect the creative process," writes Ed Catmull, president of Pixar Animation and Disney Animation. In his new book—Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand In the Way of True Inspiration—the co-founder of the company that gave the world such films as Toy Story,Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo, Catmull talks about some of the things that go into making a space conducive for creativity.

From replacing a table in the conference room that was too long and wasn’t allowing Pixar employees at either end to talk freely, to organizing regular “Braintrust" meetings where directors can bounce off ideas and get honest feedback on their work, Catmull pulls out several small and big fixes from Pixar’s nearly 30-year journey as a maker of animated films.

In a chapter on “Broadening Our View", he lists some ways in which the company has been able to support creative ideas, including bankrolling shorts. Edited excerpt:

In most companies you have to justify so much of what you do—to prepare for quarterly earnings statements if the company is publicly traded or, if it is not, to build support for your
decisions. I believe, however, that you should not be required to justify everything. We must always leave the door open for the unexpected. Scientific research operates in this way—when you embark upon an experiment, you don’t know if you will achieve a breakthrough. Chances are, you won’t. But nevertheless, you may stumble upon a piece of the puzzle along the way—a glimpse, if you will, into the unknown.

Our short films are Pixar’s way of experimenting, and we produce them in the hopes of getting exactly these kinds of glimpses. Over the years, Pixar has become known for including short films at the beginning of our feature films. These three- to six- minute films, each of which might cost as much as two million dollars to make, certainly don’t yield any profits for the company; in the immediate term, then, they’re hard to justify. What sustains them is a kind of gut feeling that making shorts is a good thing to do.

We must always leave the door open for the unexpected.... Our short films are Pixar’s way of experimenting.

Geri’s Game, which was screened in front of A Bug’s Life in 1998, was the first of what we came to call our second-generation shorts. It featured an old man sitting outside in the park in
autumn and playing a cutthroat game of chess against himself. During the nearly five-minute film—which was written and
directed by Jan Pinkava and would go on to win an Oscar—not a word is spoken other than the occasional “Ha!" that the old man utters when slamming down a chess piece with glee. The
humour is located in the way the octogenarian’s personality changes as he switches from one side of the board to the other. When his meeker persona beats his gloating alter ego by (literally) turning the tables, you can’t help but laugh.

But here was what mattered: In addition to being a delightful film, Geri’s Game helped us improve technically. Our only directive to Jan before he made it was that it had to include a human character. Why? Because we needed to get better at them. We needed to work on rendering not only the smoothly irregular surfaces of faces and hands but also the clothes that people wear. At this point, remember, because of our inability to render skin and hair and certain curved surfaces to our satisfaction, humans had only been ancillary characters in our movies. That needed to change, and Geri’s Game was an opportunity to start working on that.

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Published: 20 Apr 2014, 11:18 AM IST
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