Pixar & Disney: Process, Environment, & Culture

From Austin Bunn’s Wired article, “Welcome to Planet Pixar”:

Producing a string of blockbusters may be difficult; creating an environment that produces them is harder still. “We’ve got this question that we’re constantly asking,” says Randy Nelson. “How do you make art a team sport?” [He] runs the upstart studio’s own internal education program, Pixar University, which offers staffers [...] sessions on everything from sculpture to improvisational comedy. [...] The classes aren’t perks for a creative workplace [...]. They’re the answer to Nelson’s question. You make art a team sport by having people do it together and fail publicly at it. “You have to honor failure,” Nelson explains, “because failure is just the negative space around success.”

As Bunn writes, this is an idea Pixar got from Disney. I read about this in Christopher Finch’s The Art of Walt Disney”. There seems to be many things Pixar does that’s inspired by Disney, which is perhaps true for animation in general:

Pixar’s story development process as well as its internal lexicon – including sweatbox, when the director critiques individual animations, and plus-ing, heaping more and more good ideas on a structure that’s already working – come directly from [Disney]. [...] If the central challenge is coming up with the story, this is where Pixar owes the most to Disney, which developed the process of making animated feature films in the 1930s and 1940s. It starts with narratives that are pitched as a storyboard and then cut into a story reel, a tightly edited compilation of sketches to gauge pace and timing. Why bother? “Some day this film is going to be projected on a screen at 90 feet a minute,” explain Frank Johnson and Ollie Thomas, two of Disney’s nine old men, in the animation bible The Illusion of Life. “The sooner we start seeing it at that speed, the better.” [...] “You’re doing 90 percent of the work in the story reel,” says Monsters and Nemo codirector Lee Unkrich. “If it’s not working, you can’t polish a turd.” Everything after the story reel is just plus-ing, like the clever labels added to cereal boxes in Wazowski’s apartment in Monsters.

I’ve had Illusion of Life on my wishlist for a while. Kent Beck lists it in his annotated bibliography for Extreme Programming Explained, saying that it “[d]escribes how the team structure at Disney evolved over the years.” Disney’s process fascinates me, and for a long time I’ve felt that there are many ways in which it is relevant to software development. Not just process, but environment and culture as well. I once wrote the following in a note:

Several times Lasseter [in an interview with Robin Williams offered for free as Apple added Audible.com support to iTunes and the iPod] touches on the fact that they are constantly breaking new ground – something that was evident in the work of Walt Disney as well. There were no precedents, so they had to invent everything themselves.