Ed Cutmell |
Most of us have a perception that creative ideas have more significance than people but in this article Ed Catmull who is the president of Pixar and Disney Animation studios. According to him everyone has a very different perspective of creativity which emphasizes more on the initial idea rather than the risk that will come in producing it.
In
film making and many other kinds of complex product development, creativity
involves a large number of people from different discipline working effectively
together to solve a great many inherently unforeseeable problems. According to
Catmull its in three parts the first one is to have a project leader who will
have the authority for product development secondly to have a culture and
processes that will allow the people to open up and discuss their work and lastly
is to support each other as peers and eliminate the natural obstacles that is
dividing them.
What Is Creativity?
In a movie there are
thousands of creative ideas in .They’re in the form of every sentence; in the
performance of each line; in the design of characters, sets, and backgrounds;
in the locations of the camera; in the colors, the lighting, and the pacing.
But for all this creativity only one person is not responsible every single
member of the crew contributes towards one big idea. So there is no particular phase
for creativity it should be there on every phase not only on artistic side but
technical side too. The leader must combine couple of ideas to find one
combined idea that will support story this process is though a bit scary
because no one is sure enough that where will they end up. But being scared is
not bad because if someone is not scared means that job is not done properly
because in this business the customers wants to see something new every time
they go to the theater so which means that doing something out of the box is
really important. So they encourage unexpected ideas though they don’t know
what will be the end result but since their business to come up with something
which is not obvious, so it’s all about taking somebody’s vision and take a
chance.
So basically in this article the core is that successful organization faces two challenges the first one is to bring new
people one a single track but for them it was not a major problem because they
were already had an open culture this was been adopted by us so that newcomers
less threatening. Several prominent outsiders who have had a big impact on them
(in terms of the exciting ideas they introduced and the strong people they
attracted) were readily accepted. They include Brad Bird, who directed The
Incredibles and Ratatouille; Jim Morris, who headed Industrial
Light & Magic for years before joining Pixar as the producer of WALL·E and executive vice president of
production; and Richard Hollander, a former executive of the special-effects
studio Rhythm & Hues, who is leading an effort to improve our production
processes.
The bigger
issue for them has been getting young new hires to come up with new ideas and
speak up they wanted to change the perspective of people who always assumed that
if they are successful doesn’t means they are always right.
So in the end Catmull is searching for the problems in the Pixar’s culture and according to him is that they have a perception that clear values, constant communication, routine postmortems, and the regular injection of outsiders who will challenge the status quo are necessary but not enough to stay on the bar.So for this Catmull comes to the orientation sessions for all new hires, where he talks about the mistakes Pixar has made so people don’t assume that just because the company is successful, everything it does is right.
Link for the article
https://hbr.org/2008/09/how-pixar-fosters-collective-creativity
Link for the article
https://hbr.org/2008/09/how-pixar-fosters-collective-creativity