Pixar is known as a creative powerhouse, producing one acclaimed movie after another. In my seven years at Pixar, the studio won six out of its 14 Academy Awards. It was incredible to witness. But what is Pixar’s secret sauce?
Many other well-funded studios have an impressive roster of creative luminaries, yet none share this level of acclaim. While talent and a healthy budget are absolutely necessary, there’s something else that I believe is the key to this consistency. Something rooted in deep respect and understanding of the creative process.
One might assume that many of Pixar’s ideas were fantastic from the start, yet Pixar’s founder Ed Catmull states that this is far from the truth: “We believe that ideas only become great when they are challenged and tested.” Furthermore, he points out that he’s met several creative geniuses in his career but not a single one could fully articulate what it was that they were striving for when they started. He puts it this way: “Early on, all of our movies suck.” It is a time-consuming and laborious process to get them from “suck to not-suck.”
The process of closing this gap is Pixar’s secret sauce: A culture that allows fragile concepts to evolve into a polished product. Efficiently iterating ideas without letting production constraints suffocate them.
The Atomic Unit of Creation
To move an idea in the right direction, productive feedback cycles are key. At a company like Pixar, this applies to everything: Every story, concept art, character, prop, garment, background, animation, effect and simulation has gone through dozens if not thousands of iterations. Even before a single Pixar frame ends up on the screen, the studio has conducted tens of thousands of feedback sessions, effectively improving every detail of every element.
Whether working alone or in a team, identifying weak points, pinpointing opportunities, and gathering ideas for improvement, will undeniably lead to a higher quality result. Perfecting this iteration process, this “atomic unit of creation” is what makes all the difference.
Establishing a Healthy Feedback Culture
The first challenge for any production is to institutionalize a healthy culture that encourages a respectful review and feedback process. Pointing out what isn’t working is not helpful in itself. A deeper understanding of the original intention is fundamental, allowing us to provide actionable ideas on how to improve upon it. Feedback needs to be goal-oriented, well-formulated and unambiguous, so that others can understand and leverage it.
Does this become time-consuming and costly? For sure. But moving forward with an immature idea will be vastly more expensive. More importantly, frequent reviews are needed to check in on the health of an idea. If despite the most sincere efforts, an idea fails to improve, it may be time to kill your darling. It can feel incredibly slow at times, but a healthy review process is always the most efficient path to a successful product.
Art Is Never Finished, Only Abandoned
Budgets are the curse and savior for any artist. Without them, artists would keep iterating until things are perfect and then some. Production timelines ensure that every puzzle piece is “finaled” and moved along at some point, ready to join the larger ensemble.
To get the best results in a given time it’s critical to optimize the review cycle, so it can happen frequently: Each cycle allows the artist to refocus, reprioritize, and ultimately deliver the best possible result. Having the right tools is nothing less than fundamental in creating a healthy review process.
Tools used for collaborative review keep evolving with the times and circumstances; For visual reviews, paper notebooks have been swapped for tablets, pencils to stylus and laser pointers. However, physical proximity was typically viewed as essential up until the pandemic enforced rapid changes to the game.
Studios had to adapt their existing review process to fit the remote-working circumstances at the drop of a hat. This shift in priorities coupled with the ongoing digital revolution has driven studios to turn towards clever tech solutions, permanently changing workflows from the inside out.
Navigating a Shifting Landscape
The revolution of the review process seems to be here to stay, even for teams who are returning to the office or considering a hybrid model. Tools powered by cloud technology are not only capable of replacing in-person reviews but also augmenting them, making the pipeline more flexible to fluctuating needs.
Making sure everyone’s voice is heard and understood can become difficult when all communication is done via calls and emails. This is further exacerbated by the fact that as the pandemic left businesses all over the world scrambling, the tools that many in the industry tried to use initially were simply not suited to the task. Sharing huge files via Dropbox or attempting synchronized playthroughs on Zoom caused additional time delays and frustration.
“Like most studios over the last year or so, we had to quickly adjust to a hybrid way of working so remote review tools have been incredibly useful. When people have to work at home, or if somebody is permanently remote, being able to watch the animation together and scrub through it together was amazing,” says Michael Tucker, Producer at Double Fine. “Especially now, remote review tools help keep our team inclusive, regardless of what the situation is moving forward.”
Finding the Right Fit
Recognizing that emails, video calls and tools like Slack are simply not an efficient way to exchange visual feedback is the first step. Finding a tool that suits the needs of the studio as well as the artists is no easy feat, and involves a fair amount of experimentation.
To keep them in their creative flow, tools need to be intuitive, clearly organized and easy to navigate, enabling true visual communication with synchronized playthroughs. On the technical side, any tools need to integrate seamlessly into the existing pipeline.
For many studios, it’s not only the internal review processes that require consideration. External collaboration with artists and clients scattered all over the world is becoming increasingly common within the industry, and that shift in trends translates into a need to share files quickly and securely outside of the premises.
Benefits of Adopting the Right Tool
Tech problems that disrupt the creative workflow cost time and money, often leading to overburdened teams, tightened deadlines and, perhaps worse of all, subpar results. Reversely, a streamlined review process encourages collaboration in a way that can truly unlock the creative power of a team, even bringing back some of the missing sparks that so easily get lost in a remote setting.
The positive effects of having the right tool for the job are felt immediately. Not having to wait around for files to upload, or revisit email chains to filter through threads upon threads of comments frees up valuable time for artists to focus on their art.
As Catmull points out, “Creativity has to start somewhere, and we are true believers in the power of bracing, candid feedback and the iterative process — reworking, reworking and reworking again until a flawed story finds its throughline or a hollow character finds its soul.”
What we can learn from Pixar is that this creative iteration is a sure-fire recipe for success. The cloud may have just ushered in the Golden Age of creative feedback: New, innovative tools now enable any studio to foster a healthy feedback culture where artists can communicate at ease — no matter where they are.
Bernhard Haux is the co-founder of SyncSketch, a real-time visual communication platform, recently acquired by Unity. With over 25 years in the industry, Bernhard has contributed to features such as Up, Toy Story 3, Brave, Monsters University and Inside Out as a character modeler/rigger and articulation artist, as well as Emmy-winning VR projects.
