Tour notes - Pixar part 3: The Big Leaf
The first place we went on our tour was into the common area, to the place where everybody eats. There's a little area for you to buy food and a few tables and chairs as well. At first I couldn't figure out what would be so impressive about tables and chairs - "are we going to eat now?" I'm always up for that, as long as there's no cheese.
Instead Randy pointed to a really neat mural on the wall, clearly from "A Bug's Life". He said that "A Bug's Life" was a really important movie in Pixar's history. They were fresh off the heels of "Toy Story" and it was really important that the next movie do well. There was some pressure on this one.
They wanted to give everyone a real impression of what a bug's life really is. One of the things they did early on was set up some tiny cameras on sticks and actually run around a grassy area out back. They discovered something interesting - that while when we look down at grass it seems opaque, in reality it is not. If you get underneath that canopy you can actually see quite well, but the light is diffused.
OK, back to the mural. It was a shot of a bunch of ants moving a leaf. You couldn't see the ants clearly, though, because they were backlit and you were actually seeing their silhouette through the leaf. It was a really striking shot. That mural was done rather early on while they were coming up with the "look" of the movie. After some deliberation it was determined that this mural was "the look".
Randy then asked us an interesting question - "what is the most challenging part of the creative (or collaborative) process?" We all stared at each other because we didn't want to look stupid in front of this guy. We threw out a few guesses and he finally answered it for us. He said the most challenging part of the process was taking work from a large number of people and having only one fingerprint. Each person has their own style, and they add their own flavor to what they do. And that's great, except the final product needs to have only one fingerprint, not hundreds. That idea became a driving force behind the development of "A Bug's Life" as well as future movies.
When an artist came up with a concept sketch, or a render for that matter, it was compared with that mural. And the idea was not to decide if it was good or bad, or right or wrong, or better or worse. The question that was asked was "Does it fit?" And if it fit it belonged in the movie. If it didn't fit it was not discarded. Instead it was set aside into a separate pile. I sort of wondered why they would keep bad ideas, but Randy explained that there were no bad ideas. There are just ideas that match the concept and others that don't match. That doesn't make them good or bad, it's simply matching or non-matching.
Randy said that often when they hit a wall creatively they would go through some of the non-matching ideas for inspiration. And many times the solution to the problem they faced was in a sketch or idea or concept that didn't fit earlier. So it's a good thing those ideas weren't rejected, or discarded.
