What Dreams May Come
Toys
Baron Munchausen
MirrorMask

In the final example, I wanted more exploration of the intricate designs. Instead, most of the more interesting objects and concepts in that movie made up background. The problem was that often they seemed like such enticing side-roads that to get just a passing glimpse added to the frustration. Oh – and the designs also suffered because the budget was clearly small. There was an overall grade and treatment to the film which looked as though a handful of freelancers worked on it for free coffee and pizza. Heartbreaking, because it could have been truly visionary. I was certainly expecting more.

Acting is another topic altogether, I suppose.

I have a feeling that a lot of people believe that great visuals will save a project. Even looking at the recent Avatar movie, when you strip out the incredible 3D story telling, the story, while solid, isn’t epic. There are a lot of little ‘holes’ and some serious stereotyping to keep the story moving along. However, the visual were so amazing and the acting was believable and engrossing, that I think the suspension of disbelief was powerful enough to overcome any story shortcomings. People see an example like this and think that visuals will save ANY story, and it just ain’t so.

“There’s too much vfx in films. I’m tired of huge robots, I like films like Cast Away that have less vfx”. Cast Away is a good example here because half of the film is completely a visual effect. Most of the island shots were shot out in a parking lot in California, and it’s one of the films that many people point to when we talk about “invisible vfx”.

VFX/art is just a tool used to help tell a story. Personally I love what vfx can do to help me see amazing things on screen. “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe…” . Giant transforming robots, space battles, a horse with wings, flying monkeys, a floating city, a never-ending government warehouse: People know these things can’t be real. I know they’re not real and fantasy and science fiction are two genres where many of the things you see can’t be real. I relish in the fact that I get to see these things in a dark room. Without VFX, I would have never had the chance to see these things.

On a side note, audiences often have a false sense of how sophisticated they are. People claiming that they didn’t like the soundstage for the surface shots of Kledathu in Starship troopers (it’s actually a real place called hells half acre), and I’ve seen many people assume that the Imperial Shuttle in this matte painting by Michael Pangrazio, was the real ship they built but with a blue screen behind it. The shot, except for Darth Vader, is entirely a matte painting.

http://www.mattepainting.org/vb/album.php?albumid=1&pictureid=35

But I digress: a lack of story, good plot, and characters we care about shouldn’t be blamed on the vfx. If the filmmaker’s intent is to dazzle you with stunning imagery, and there’s little thought given to plot, then by all means…blame the director and his/her overuse of vfx.

This video has been floating around for the past couple days, but I thought I’d drop it here. Really interesting talk on where good ideas come from, the thesis of which is they spring from “the connected mind.”

http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_where_good_ideas_come_from.html

It’s clear to anyone inside or outside of the animation industry that both DTS and Pixar have developed every release internally. The one exception I can think of is ‘The Incredibles.’

The Fairies franchise is based on the Disney version of Tinker Bell and every Pixar feature was created by someone who was already inside. However, Pixar believes in bringing people in to ‘shake things up’ as often as necessary. Some examples are Tom McCarthy on ‘UP’ and Michael Arndt on TS3.

But I digress. It is no debate that Brad Bird is one of the best auteur filmmakers alive today. He brought ‘Incredibles’ in to Pixar and it changed dramatically. Or, more specifically, it developed into the film we all know and love.

I am sure there were changes that were made to the plot, characters etc… …and I’m certain that some of those things that changed were pretty good to begin with. So if Brad Bird invites changes to *his* original idea, then I think we all need to be inviting change on some level as long as “change” is part of true & vital “development.”

There are times at all of these studios that the stories suffer. Ed Catmull himself is very open about that. He says that Pixar has never released a movie that wasn’t, at some point, a total disaster.

So all that is to say that in a collaboration, changes/ additions/ subtractions are inevitable in a studio environment but they can also be indispensable if the environment is right.

I’m not saying that an artist can’t go off on their own and create something great all on their own. But I think that if the collaborative environment is a place where stories grow from good to great, it doesn’t matter how defined the story is from the outset, it will still improve.

I think Cartsen’s on to something. Another possibility is that there are way more stories out there than designs. So when you’re trying to come up with a new story, and told it HAS to be in a 3 act play that follows the heroes’ journey, then you get writing that is not as great.

Pixar trusts a good story will sell.

Also, what is great to one person is lousy to another. And if it’s close enough to something that’s made money before, it’s more likely to get green lit. Which is another reason that the art isn’t pushed as much as it could be. There is some incredible art in shorts that don’t have the financial backers demanding it be watered down to appeal to more people.

It’s interesting to see an animator take an ok design and make it really come to life and have personality and everyone loves it. Or they can take an ok design and make it awful by the lousy animation.

Since I have no idea how projects move at the size of the ones you work on, I have a kind of reverse question: Do you think it’s possible for a writer or a director to come into a studio structure like where you work and have a team work on their story without changing it or adding to it? Would that be a challenge considering how collaborative the creative process is there? This would essentially mean the story was written and guided by one person and the team works to achieve that one person’s story…
Would the story suffer as a result?

Personally, I like movies that depend on people and story to move me, instead of effects. I’m not against effects, but the outcome of the film shouldn’t hinge on them. There are exceptions to this rule, like in Bladerunner. However, the effects in that movie were more like a another character in the film. Without the effects Bladerunner would not have been as deep and/or compelling.

I say this because at DTS, at Pixar and at Disney Feature Animation I’ve witnessed a lot of cooks working together in a studio scenario and they end up with something much better than what they would have come up with on their own.

I guess it’s a matter of how the collaboration is orchestrated. There is usually an all-encompassing ‘director’s vision’ that keeps everything cohesive and filters out the negatives inherent to the ‘too many cooks’ way of working.

Also: persistence. I heard Andrew Stanton once say something like ‘Where a lot of studios stop the writer at the 12th draft of a script, Pixar lets the writer go for the 13th.’ Of course, he means that we just need to keep working on it until it’s good. And that can be with one cook or ten cooks as long as there is a master chef orchestrating the chaos.

Moving images give us the a vehicle by which our mind is carried, mostly on rails, through a ride of storytelling. Metaphorically, some rides are crafted better than others. We are given enough information that through most stories, we don’t have to think to fill in too many of the blanks. Unlike a painting, we as audiences are given thousands of frames and hours of music and sound that provide scenes, sequences, acts, plots and subplots.

I do think it is harder to create good storytelling through film/movies/tv, but when the filmmakers/creators are given enough backing, financially and support-wise, the results can be extraordinary.

To the person who believes that there isn’t enough quality storytelling being delivered in movies and TV: I would say you’re not looking hard enough. The efforts of gifted storytellers aren’t always backed by large studios, sometimes you have to actively look for them.

I wonder if this has something to do with inductive reasoning versus deductive reasoning. As in, imagery tends to be inductive and story tends to be deductive. When you see an image, you instantly absorb it all, draw and conclusion, and only afterwards can start sussing out why you drew the conclusion you drew. But I think this increases the likelihood of being able to reintepret or spot flaws in an image. If good design leads a person to draw a conclusion about something (i.e. this place is scary or safe, this charcter is bad or good, this item is new or old, etc.) without evidence to support the conclusion (as in, most people are not consciously running through elements of a design and weighing them against each other to see how they feel, they just feel, or react), then, as an image’s creator, stepping away form it for even a short time can really give you fresh eyes, as it were. You get to draw fresh conclusions from what’s already there.

Story, on the other hand, must be reasoned deductively. A lot of story telling is contingent upon the audience NOT immediately being able to draw the conclusion of what’s happening/what everything means. They’re supposed to reason through it, follow it step-by-step, and hit upon conclusions as designed. by the authors. But when writing, the authors have to do the same things. And, in my own story writing experience, it is extremely difficult to know when you’ve made a leap of story telling logic as a writer that your audiences are not going to. This leads writers to over explain, over exposit, and over indulge is things that might not be essential, and to under explain, ignore, or gloss over things that might be really important.

Another way of putting this… I’ve never looked at a character design and said, “Look at that plot hole.” I just draw my conclusions about the character, determine through the course of the story whether those conlusions were successful at reinforcing the telling of the story, and then decide whether that was good design or not.

With story, on the other hand, we are acutely aware of when a conclusion is drawn that the previously presented evidence does not reinforce. But, in an author’s mind, it often is reinforced, thought that doesn’t explicitly make it into the story. Basically, I’m doubtful as to whether or not an author, group of authors, or director can ever really bring fresh eyes to a story.

And I think THAT’s why companies like Pixar are doing something so valuable for themselves with their lethal story editing sessions, where people outside the project come take a look at the movie as a whole, as it stands, and tear it apart. This is why novelists have test readers and editors.

Once you’ve drawn a conclusion deductively, it’s really hard to UNDRAW that conclusion without exposure to some outside idea that highlights why your conclusion isn’t working. Mostly because you have reasons why you think it is working. They’re all mapped out in your brain.

Basically, I wonder if writing and directing aren’t, more often than not, too insular, too dependent on limitied visions. I wonder if this isn’t a cheif reason why sharing story process is so important to people struggling to tell them.