

Lessons from Pixar: Innovation through collective creativity - quizbiz
http://speakerdeck.com/u/nirlevy/p/collective-creativity

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erichocean
tl;dr: Not worth a read.

As someone who has spent an enormous amount of time studying Pixar's process,
and why it works, I can tell you that the author of those slides simply
cribbed material from an Ed Catmull speech, and has no clue what was important
from that speech and what was not.

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quizbiz
You're right. I almost regret this submission. But without your comment, I
would have stopped exploring this.

What would you add? What did I miss?

I didn't really think through submitting this to HN. I certainly haven't had
the luxury of studying Pixar's process in depth. I guess the title gives off
the wrong impression.

I quickly made these slides to try to extract some concrete lessons from Ed's
article in HBR. As I grapple with creative autonomy in my own startup, these
slides were a way for me to start to think about introducing ideas to the co-
founders.

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ollerac
I really appreciate your humility. It's obvious you're genuinely looking for
something and that's heartening.

You might want to check out some interviews with John Lasseter. I enjoyed this
video that documents one of his days at Pixar:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5HN3-l_f-U>

~~~
erichocean
Agreed, didn't meant to sound as harsh as I did to the OP.

Re: What did Pixar do that is new... Pixar is fundamentally a film studio that
applied tech development methods to the creation of feature films. This was
huge in the film world, which uses what tech people call the "waterfall"
model. (We abandoned that approach everywhere but in government back in the
70s.)

On the creative side, it's true that Pixar is a director-driven studio, but
all films are basically director-driven. What's more interesting is that Pixar
directors get to iteratively improve the film many times. This is something
that most studios CANNOT do, due to technical limitations. The ability to
iterate is HUGE, and is the main reason why Pixar films are so good when they
are released.

Basically, Pixar makes bad films -- they just never release them. Instead,
they take that film and make it better, over and over, for four-five years
straight. THEN, and only then, do they release it to the public.
(Incidentally, this is what Apple does.)

Pixar has a lot of other worthy corporate values, but in the filmmaking
sphere, their success is mostly a result of having better tools and processes.

For a non-Pixar example of that in the film world, consider movie trailers.
Before the advent of computer-editing (what we call non-linear editing, e.g.
Final Cut Pro, Avid, etc.), movie trailers SUCKED. They were laughably bad.
After computer-editing? Much, much better. Same people, same films, DIFFERENT
TOOLING. And far, far better results.

Sometimes, the tools really do matter. In Pixar's case, the lesson is that
iteration is huge. In the tech world, the Lean Startup approach would be the
equivalent model.

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apollo
I think this was derived from Ed Catmull's talk at Stanford.

Link: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2h2lvhzMDc>

