Post-christmas notes #3

In an attempt to get back on the blogging track, I’ll just list my notes in no particular order. Here are the things I thought about during the holidays, but never got around to post:

• Regarding how Disney had to plan everything in advance when making his animated movies (according to what Christopher Finch writes in The Art of Walt Disney): each scene was indeed pre-planned, but the process was clearly iterative and adaptive, since each scene was “prototyped”, judged, revised, re-judged, until the team was satisfied with it – only then was the scene shot.
• A lot of thoughts about architecture came to me. For example, I thought about it as I was reading Alan Watts’ Nature, Man and Woman, about how objects blend in with their surroundings rather than standing on their own. I have touched on the idea that the design of an object is defined to a large extent by its users: there’s not one optimal design for an object, because it depends on whichever objects uses it.
• I have thought about the importance of having a common vision in a team. I think I first thought about this as I read the Disney book: Disney had many animators that actually had much freedom (at least that’s my interpretation) but to whom he had to communicate his vision; both his overall vision and the particular vision for the movie in production. This was done by lots of face-to-face communication, on-site training, and books with model sheets (the designs of the characters) and texts explaining the characters’ traits. I also thought about The Smaller Picture project, where everybody can join the hive mind in creating images. Here the common vision is very simple, but it’s an effective illustration of this principle: a team that create something together without someone doing the design work.
• I thought about to what extent screen writing is an adaptive process. I remember watching a behind-the-scenes Friends documentary; they shoot the episodes in front of a live audience with the writers present. If a joke isn’t understood, they discuss alternatives and re-shoot the scene to see if it works better. This might serve as an example of why it’s important to have the end-user try the software being developed at regular intervals.
• Then I thought about architecture again. I have compared architecture to storytelling and writing, and there are many commonalities. In a way, an architecture is a “grammar for the system”, in that it defines what “expressions” are “valid”.

I’ll continue this at a later time.