it every day; everybody is doing it. When you get over the
embarrassment, you become more creative," says Catmull. Without the
worry and anxiety - indeed, the sense of risk - that comes hand in
hand with revealing themselves, people remove the filter that
sometimes keeps great ideas trapped in their heads.
Having a culture that encourages people to unload all their ideas
without feeling threatened is vital to everything Pixar does. "When
you look at a movie, there are thousands and thousands of ideas,"
says Catmull. The
director and the company need them all to come up
with the very best ideas for the story, characters, and visuals of
a film. In fact, everyone at the company will tell you there are no
bad ideas at Pixar, even if they don't end up in a movie. Consider
the entire four-year process of making a movie. The first two years
are devoted almost entirely to developing the narrative of the
story and the characters, beginning with a storyboard and
eventually resulting in a
story reel.
Only in the third and fourth years does technology really come into
play. And that is very much by design. Why? Technology always
serves the story, not vice versa. "Pixar has gotten a lot of press
for being the first to use CG for animated feature films," says
Brad Bird, director of
The Incredibles. "It was always
technology that everybody talked about, and to me that was the
least interesting reason to come here. The reason to come here was
because they were doing original stories."
Another integral part of the first two years of making a film is
letting the company's artists explore different conceptions of the
world and characters that will come alive in the movie. The artists
use anything they can think of to assist them. For
A Bug's
Life, tiny video cameras were placed in flowerbeds to observe
the world from a bug's perspective. For Finding Nemo, aquariums
were set up around the office, marine biologists were brought in to
give talks, and a diving trip to
Hawaii was arranged. From all of
these things come more ideas - and drawings and sculptures - that
help visualize potential aspects of the movie.