The Art of Walt Disney #3

What I think is interesting with Disney is that, in the beginning, they were working with something completely new: animation. Naturally, they must have been doing a lot of exploration. Animation was expensive, since every single image was first drawn on paper, then traced onto glass, which was then painted. Later, they started to use “multiplane cameras” to get the feel of depth in the scenes; essentially separating the scene into layers, which were then placed on different levels against the background.

Because it was expensive and involved a lot of work, they must have been constantly thinking of simpler ways of accomplishing the desired results. So, the early Disney movies were innovative in many different ways: they took old fairy tales and turned them into new stories; they invented new characters to play the roles in the movie, and so on – but, they also had a paint lab where they developed new types of paint; they developed new sound systems (for Fantasia); they invented new camera rigs; and so on.

You can safely say that they were creative about every aspect of their work. This isn’t hard to fathom in the case of Disney. It’s clear that what they did was new and that there were not that many points of reference in history. They had to invent everything along the way. In software, however, most people are convinced that building software is like building bridges or houses, and therefore adopt processes from those worlds.

From reading The Art of Walt Disney, it’s obvious that there was much communication going on there. I guess that every participant in the projects had the freedom to be creative both regarding the actual film that was made, as well as when it came to improving the process. This was probably communicated in the frequent meetings, to get feedback from the others, to come up with still better ways of doing things.

Today, in the software business, the followers of the agile movement talk about “agile” as if it would be something new; in fact, Disney were agile (because they had to).