The Art of Walt Disney #2

I’m almost finished with The Art of Walt Disney now, and although quite fascinating, it only hints at Disney’s creativity and the process they used as they made the films. Regarding him being the master planner, I’m sure he was a control freak, but he did separate the work between his animators, which to me seem to have had quite much freedom after all.

The work seems to have been structured around a core consisting of Disney himself, together with a handful of people that were responsible for the music, the visuals, etc. The entire machinery was coordinated with high volumes of communication and the use of model sheets (guidelines for how to draw the specific characters) and written guidelines to set the mood or tone of the work of the artists. They used “prototyping” to get a feel for each scene before doing it correctly, then met and discussed it thoroughly. (I guess they did new prototypes if the first wasn’t good enough.)

Reading about this has convinced me that there’s much to learn for programmers by studying how movies are made. I have written about this earlier, for example here. Movies are very expensive to make and a flop can often be disastrous; yet “simple” methods such as face-to-face communication, sketches, and storyboards, are seen as suitable means of executing a project. In software, however, the tools must be “advanced”, or they are ridiculed; the obvious simple ones are often not even considered.

I didn’t know that Walt Disney rather early stopped doing artistic work, such as drawings, to become a coordinator instead. I would definitely like to read more about him and his methods of leading the people making the movies. Perhaps the revised edition (which came in 1995) of this book contains more of it. As for this first edition, the text isn’t that interesting; it is merely an account of the history of the company, and not enough about how the films were made.