

Ed Catmull on Surfacing Failures / Remaining Original at Pixar [2007] [video] - jeremyw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2h2lvhzMDc

======
apu
I saw Catmull's keynote at SIGGRAPH 2008, and it was spectacular. It had some
common elements to this one, but was different overall. What really struck me
was how he is not quite a manager, nor a technical person, nor a creative
person, but somehow an "organizer" for all 3 of the above groups to work
together to create magnificent works of art.

I think in large part this comes from his technical background, which is
simply incredible: student of Ivan Sutherland's (of Sketchpad fame), inventor
or discoverer of z-buffering, antialiasing, texture mapping, subdivision
surfaces, b-splines, and key developer of Renderman!

(For those not in computer graphics, any one of these would be sufficient to
give you lifetime fame.)

------
jeremyw
This is a great talk and I recommend you watch it. Here are the cliff notes.

\- Constantly review

\- People and how they function are more important than ideas; ideas come as a
result

\- Do not let success mask problems, do deep assessments

\- Organizations fall over by default, slowly enough that you don't notice it

\- Everything you do has to be original, you can't repeat yourself, dig
deeper, you're always missing something important

What strikes me is how they've internalized successive originality in each
project. The latter half of their repetoire is something new in animation:
Wall*E, Ratatouille, The Incredibles.

~~~
dennisgorelik
Correction: \-- Organizations fall over by default, slowly enough that you can
fix them if you care. \-- Ed did NOT say that because organization fall slowly
it's hard to notice. He implied that you have time to fix the failure... you
just have to put conscious effort to notice the problem and then another
effort to fix it (while organization is still successful overall).

~~~
jeremyw
He says "... organizations are inherently unstable, they will fall over, you
have to work to keep them upright, but they fall slowly, most people don't
notice it, they let success blind them." -- roughly minute 34.

I wouldn't want to misparaphrase him, but I think my notes are accurate.

------
noonespecial
22:20

"The other thing to note is that there is a confusion that people have,
because the books and the press kind of work this way; We think about 'an
idea'. We think about ideas for movies, ideas for products, and its usually
thought of as some singular thing. The reality is these successful movies and
these successful products have got thousands of ideas. There's all sorts of
things necessary to make it and be successful and you have to get _most_ of
them right."

Pure gold.

------
akamaka
Wow, this is great, thanks for posting!

The 1980s were a fascinating time in computer graphics, and there are few
people who are better qualified to talk about it. Ed Catmull practically
embodies the history of the field, starting out at the University of Utah,
moving to commercial work and struggling for years before finally achieving
the ultimate success at Pixar.

I also find him to be an excellent role model, as someone who worked over many
years to achieve a real and lasting impact, very much different from some the
lucky entrepreneurs of the last decade who receive so much undeserved praise.

------
10ren
This guy is so cool. He's like world class, a pioneer, a revolutionary. And
yet he's talking about all this stuff as if he was digging ditches... that
he's really into. He cares about it for its own sake.

The way he describes that story-teller brain-trust at the start (trust,
necessarily honest) I think also describes him.

------
10ren
"make mistakes and learn from them".

So obvious, well-known and true... but it has a certain reassuring omph when
someone at the absolute top of their field says it, with examples from their
experience.

It doesn't need to be right the first time. In fact, it _can't_ be right the
first time, because there's things that you don't know - and can't know - til
you make those mistakes. He said they're "failures, but that's not quite the
right word". Another word is "experiment", but that doesn't capture how much
these mistakes hurt. They are real.

