Ed Catmull and the Harvard Business Review

Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation, has written an article for the Harvard Business Review that can be read here. There is also a podcast you can find here.

Both focus on organizational structure and the steps that Pixar has taken to prevent the mistakes that are all too common in business. Here are some excerpts from the article:

"To act in this fashion, we as executives have to resist our natural tendency to avoid or minimize risks, which, of course, is much easier said than done. In the movie business and plenty of others, this instinct leads executives to choose to copy successes rather than try to create something brand-new. That’s why you see so many movies that are so much alike. It also explains why a lot of films aren’t very good. If you want to be original, you have to accept the uncertainty, even when it’s uncomfortable, and have the capability to recover when your organization takes a big risk and fails. What’s the key to being able to recover? Talented people!"

"Creative power in a film has to reside with the film’s creative leadership. As obvious as this might seem, it’s not true of many companies in the movie industry and, I suspect, a lot of others. We believe the creative vision propelling each movie comes from one or two people and not from either corporate executives or a development department. Our philosophy is: You get great creative people, you bet big on them, you give them enormous leeway and support, and you provide them with an environment in which they can get honest feedback from everyone."

"Everyone must have the freedom to communicate with anyone. This means recognizing that the decision-making hierarchy and communication structure in organizations are two different things. Members of any department should be able to approach anyone in another department to solve problems without having to go through “proper” channels. It also means that managers need to learn that they don’t always have to be the first to know about something going on in their realm, and it’s OK to walk into a meeting and be surprised. The impulse to tightly control the process is understandable given the complex nature of moviemaking, but problems are almost by definition unforeseen. The most efficient way to deal with numerous problems is to trust people to work out the difficulties directly with each other without having to check for permission. It must be safe for everyone to offer ideas."

I've never worked at Pixar or even visited the place. Catmull makes it sound somewhat utopian, but I've worked in enough companies to know that people within a company are always competing for plum assignments or for having their vision prevail. That's human nature and I doubt that Pixar has found a way to re-engineer it. However, Pixar has had a remarkable run at the box office and remains a leader in the field, so I can only assume that the company philosophy has helped them in their continued success. It certainly sounds different from most of the places I've worked, none of which have been as successful.

(link via Cinematech.)

An Alternate Feature Production Model

Animated features originate under two sets of circumstances today. One set of features comes from ongoing studios such as Pixar, DreamWorks, and Blue Sky. They are characterized by large staffs and high overhead, which result in films with high budgets and the need for massive success at the box office. Budgets are routinely $75 million and up.

The danger of this model comes from a box office failure. Should a film flop, the loss is enormous. Pixar and Blue Sky are owned by larger corporate entities (Disney and Fox respectively), while DreamWorks is independent. While Pixar and Blue Sky might be better positioned to survive failures, Disney (which shut down drawn animation) and Fox (which closed down Don Bluth's Arizona studio) have both proved that corporate parents are not always forgiving.

The benefits of the Pixar-type model is continuity. Mistakes and breakthroughs that occur on a project increase the corporate knowledge base, improving the quality of each successive film.

The other type of animated feature comes from producers who assemble teams or find subcontractors for single films. These films are lower budget, perhaps as low as $15 million, so they don't need to gross as much at the box office in order to make a profit. Generally, when a film of this type is complete, the crew is laid off or the subcontracting studio left to fend for itself. The next time the producer gets a film underway, a new crew is assembled or a new subcontractor is found. Even if the same subcontractor is hired, the odds are that their crew has turned over unless the subcontractor was lucky enough to find a constant flow of work in the interim.

These producers, frequently struggling to find financing, often put their productions in whatever location offers the best financial incentives, such as direct investment or tax breaks. John Williams produced three features, Valiant, Everyone's Hero and Space Chimps, in three different cities with three entirely different crews.

These two approaches result in an increasing gap in production values (and often in scripts as well). While Pixar, DreamWorks and Blue Sky raise the bar with every new production, the one-off features are figuring out the basics for every film. While they are busy re-inventing the wheel, the larger studios are inventing teleportation devices.

I think that there's an alternative model that falls between the two. The strength of the larger studios is skill and knowledge continuity and the strength of the independent producers is low overhead. A combination of the two would raise costs somewhat, but would also allow a producer to make increasingly better films.

A producer could assemble a small team of fewer than 20 people who would be permanent employees. These people would be the equivalent of department heads. They would need to be experienced and flexible. For each project, these people would do prototyping, figuring out how to solve production problems, building a pipeline and setting the style for the film. They would take sample shots to completion, so that every stage of the production could be tested on a small scale. Once they have workable solutions, the production could then seek out subcontracting studios.

The department heads would have to relocate to wherever the subcontractors were. Their job would be to work directly with the crew, educating them as to how the production should be accomplished. They should also work with the crew individually, learning everyone's strengths and weaknesses. Too often with subcontractors, studios only have contact with supervisors and so are ignorant of the talents of the crew. Casting talent is one of the most important and powerful tools a production has to put quality work on the screen.

Because the department heads will have first-hand knowledge as to how the film should be produced, subcontractors should be able to work efficiently. Inevitably, new problems will arise during production, but because the department heads are physically present, they can contribute to the solutions and take the knowledge back with them to the parent company once the production is complete.

The producer has to find the money to keep the core team together. Without it, the result is the John Williams model of starting over with every film. Ideally, budgets can be kept low enough with this system to allow for sufficient profits to make this possible. Of course, this assumes that a producer is interested in a better product rather than a quick profit.

Brad Bird and Management

I've come to the conclusion that the hardest job to do well is management. Managing your career - figuring out which jobs to take, when to leave a studio, whether to relocate - is difficult and made more difficult if you're in a relationship, have children, etc. These are the decisions that keep people up at night.

Managing a staff is also difficult. In the animation business, the people who end up supervising are good at their craft, but what knowledge do they have about keeping people happy and productive while still hitting the deadline and the budget? In every industry there are managers who have lousy people skills or the wrong priorities and end up with cost overruns, shoddy quality and a high staff turnover as a result. Anyone who has ever had a job knows what I'm talking about.

So here's a really interesting interview with Brad Bird, conducted for McKinsey & Company, a corporate consultant that specializes in innovation. Unfortunately, you're going to have to register to read it (Rick May suggests the bugmenot.com username pjs@mailinator.net and password 142), but the interview is excellent because it asks Bird about things that other interviewers would never think to ask, such as how Pixar stays innovative and how Bird works with his crew and gets things on the screen.

"When I directed The Iron Giant, I inherited a team that was totally broken—a bunch of miserable people who had just gone through a horrific experience on a previous film that had bombed. When the time came for animators to start showing me their work, I got everybody in a room. This was different from what the previous guy had done; he had reviewed the work in private, generated notes, and sent them to the person.

"For my reviews, I got a video projector and had an animator’s scenes projected onto a dry-erase board. I could freeze a frame and take a marker and show where I thought things should be versus where they were. I said, “Look, this is a young team. As individual animators, we all have different strengths and weaknesses, but if we can interconnect all our strengths, we are collectively the greatest animator on earth. So I want you guys to speak up and drop your drawers. We’re going to look at your scenes in front of everybody. Everyone will get humiliated and encouraged together. If there is a solution, I want everyone to hear the solution, so everyone adds it to their tool kit. I’m going to take my shot at what I think will improve a scene, but if you see something different, go ahead and disagree. I don’t know all the answers.”

"So I started in: “I think the elbow needs to come up higher here so that we feel the thrust of this action.” “I’m not seeing the thought process on the character here.” “Does anybody disagree? Come on, speak up.” The room was silent because with the previous director, anyone who dared to say anything got their head chopped off.

"For two months, I pushed and analyzed each person’s work in front of everybody. And they didn’t speak up. One day, I did my thing, and one of the guys sighed. I shouted, “What was that?” And he said, “Nothing man, it’s OK.” And I said, “No, you sighed. Clearly, you disagree with something I did there. Show me what you’re thinking. I might not have it right. You might. Show me.” So he came up, and I handed him the dry-erase marker. He erased what I did. Then he did something different and explained why he thought it ought to be that way. I said, “That’s better than what I did. Great.” Everybody saw that he didn’t get his head chopped off. And our learning curve went straight up. By the end of the film, that animation team was much stronger than at the beginning, because we had all learned from each other’s strengths. But it took two months for people to feel safe enough to speak up."

"In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget—but never shows up in a budget—is morale. If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.

"Before I got the chance to make films myself, I worked on a number of badly run productions and learned how not to make a film. I saw directors systematically restricting people’s input and ignoring any effort to bring up problems. As a result, people didn’t feel invested in their work, and their productivity went down. As their productivity fell, the number of hours of overtime would increase, and the film became a money pit."

(I want to thank friend and storyboard artist Jim Caswell for pointing me to this interview. One of the ironies of Jim's life is that he works at home, so he doesn't have to deal with the day-to-day nonsense of office life, yet he reads more books about business and management than any other artist I know.)