Frozen: The Pixar-Disney story

As Creativity Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration comes out, the world can’t help but wonder what Ed Catmull, President of Pixar Animation and Walt Disney Animation Studios has to say about leadership and the corporate culture of what is possibly the most interesting combination of organizations in the recent cinema industry.

Pixar has been phenomenally successful in its endeavors over the last decade (Toy Story, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, Up) and to boost its declining Walt Disney animations tudio Disney bought Pixar in 2006. Catmull and John Lasseter, Pixar’s CEO were appointed the president and CEO respectively. The result, Disney bounced back, initially with Tangled and Wreck it Ralph and finally it has its biggest hit in the recent times, the movie which ended up one-upping Toy Story – 3, Frozen, which earned well over a billion dollars in box office revenue. Surprisingly, this blog post is the result of an intense discussion with a  friend who incidentally hated Frozen and I had to explain these very things to him as well, only then it wasn’t this organized, ah well.

Now the one and only reason for this success is ‘Culture’. Let’s have a look at what has changed in Disney post-merger.

1)    People first.
Pixar was a task oriented group, having risen to success so fast the organizational culture laid heavy emphasis on commitment and dedication. While making Toy Story-2 the creatives team, allegedly, worked for seven days a week for nine month. Pixar had drifted into a dangerous zone and had to be pulled out, writes Catmull. There was an incident wherein a stressed out artist forgot his infant child in his car, who was later recovered unconscious in the broiling car parking, 3 hours later.
The notion here is, excellence at any cost ideology of Pixar, doesn’t work in the longer run and incidents like this are a wakeup call.

2)    Encouraging self-expression and diversity of thought.
Yet another Catmull trait, making everyone feel included. The biggest battle after a successful merger is to accommodate everyone’s opinions by making the projects all inclusive.
Pixar’s office design itself maximizes contact and collaboration. The cafeterias, meeting rooms, employee mailboxes are all centralized so as to let the users interact with each other. In fact Catmull even replaced an expensive long rectangular conference room table with another design because the older one ‘kept people on the ends of the table from interacting with each other’.
Pixar’s ‘Braintrust’ sessions, popularized post Toy Story success, are candour filled interactions between directors, artists, creative heads give each other feedback regarding the film’s progress. The director is free to act on it or not but this type of spirited discussion makes the feedback process easier, something which Disney picked on.
Yet another problem was the Pixar’s chain of command. The Production Managers at Pixar were abhorred by the technologists, probably because during the production of Toy Story the commands from the top grew so restrictive that the entire workforce revolted. There was a time when the situation got so out of hand that the Production Managers didn't even want to work at Pixar. Catmull and Lasseter gathered the entire team and made it very clear that hierarchies and channels are secondary to free discussion, when it came to creative projects.  It took a while for the top management to adjust to this change but by the time Pixar completed ‘A Bug’s Life’ all was fine.

3)    Focussing on a vision that makes people feel proud to be involved.

Pixar’s purpose is to make ‘great films’ as it goes. Brad Bird and John Walker made the Iron Giant while working for another studio and the sole reason for which they were hired by Pixar was their ability to convert projects into something much more than a money machine. Catmull states he found this astonishing drive in Pixar’s employees to focus on the quality of the content which in turn ensured that profits followed.

Catmull closes by saying that how has Pixar affected him personally. Earlier he was focused on creating the first feature film to be entirely animated on a computer, today he has found his new calling: to create a sustainable creative culture that survives long after Pixar’s founders are gone. “We are in this for the long haul” 

Cinematic Innovation: From Charlie Chaplin to Pacific Rim

“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”
~ Bill Gates

Now, this post is an attempt to reclassify the stages of automation of a field, and analyse how they have impacted the show biz.

The three phases that we wish to look at are:

Automation replacing current activity
Enhancing the activities
Inclusion of new functionality
Film industry has always been tech-savvy and they have been early adopters of every new trick and technique that they happened to stumble upon. Gone are the days when John Carpenter had to conjure up ‘The Thing’ from bread and dough, gone are the days when one could marvel at the effort which must have went in designing the effects of Nightmare of Elm Street’s bed-engulfing-Johnny-Depp scene. Effect houses like Pixar, Industrial Light and Pacific Data etc. are already functioning in the third stage. Production houses are catching up, and DreamWorks has shown great advancements (How to Train your dragon 2, Rise of the Guardians).

So, the stage 1 would be when computers substitute existing methodology of accomplishing certain tasks, rarely affecting the productivity. Lately computer based camera holding and movement have become a fad among the production houses.

Godzilla during the 80s was a man in a rubber suit, shot from a distance, when I sat through the 2014 version (staring agape at the brilliant radiation breath/fire spitting scene, MUTO ravaging scene, final scream), I couldn't help but wonder at the computerized modelling that must have went behind the movie.

Taking a rather old example:
The advent of green screen: the backgrounds used to be painfully painted over a stretch of weeks and then the movie shot in front of it. Although the green screen artists had completely substituted the painting process by 1940s yet the productivity remained the same, since the background still had to be drawn on a computer.

Also, before computers could dictate the trajectory of cameras, the cameraman had to take and retake the shot till the shot achieved perfection. Even though the editing rooms were becoming increasingly populated with computers the major chunk of the task was still done by the cameraman, while only minor editing changes being carried out by the team.
“Computer Effects” would sum up the second stage. Explosions were simulated; men were copied and pasted to create crowds. The production became quicker. The pyrotechnics weren’t needed; Model artists were replaced with ‘Matte artists’ and ‘Optical Printers’. ‘Digital Composting’ allowed a scene to be shot first and then the backdrop added. The cameras were computer-guided, requiring only one-take-scenes.

Existing computerized processes were made more and more efficient. The focus of film making shifted from Pre-production to Post-production; a process which was becoming increasingly automated. Precision and accuracy increased, the pan-dimensional-circling-Michael-Bay-esque shots could be better shot by an overhead computerized camera rather than any camera-rig or steadicam or dolly-set up.

Gonzo, Hip-Hop montage and the Irreversible style camerawork could be now achieved with minimal human intervention and handling.
Newer functions would dominate the next decade of cinema. Movies are becoming completely automated and animated. We have newer technologies like Imax and 3-D, which have redefined the movie-going experience creating an entirely new customer-segment.

Encouraged by past successes, the production houses tend to keep employing newer methods of automation and innovation. Recently released ‘Elysium’ was released in Immersive Audio (Auro 11.1 and Dolby Atmos), a technology which allows producers to dynamically mix audio post-production (something that Peter Jackson has vehemently defended over the past couple of months).

Post IMAX, we have Anamorphic lenses (Cinemascope) which is essentially a return of discarded technology, which is being considered a repeat of what happened post the death of the original debut of 3-D.
(Thor: the dark worlds was shot in Anamorphic Wide Screen)

Some developments in the pipeline:
-Computational Cinematography
-High Frame Rates (The Hobbit, even though it made some people throw up at 48 fps it is considered to be more relaxing to our eyes)
-SimulCam (Avatar, essentially motion capture technology with a live feed, instead of waiting for the post-production phase to put the CGI in the frame, SimulCam allows the director to dynamically view the CGI rendering of the actors in front of a green screen and allows for direction of the movie like a regular movie, with real actors being shot in CG anime.
-Live CG (Star Wars VII is supposed to be shot in Live CG. Currently being tested, Lucasfilm has dropped a lot of hints about the technology)


Although any conclusion to this post would be thoroughly insufficient (?!) yet it can be said that automation has resulted in strengthening of the profession and the benefits outweigh the costs, we have the biggest hits coming from the CGI-digital factories (Titanic, LOTR, Avengers Assemble, Frozen, Avatar, Toy Story, Transformers, Iron Man 3 etc.)

Once again the shift in required skill sets has rendered many unemployed and major league animation studios have ended up becoming the biggest winners. But when you need giant robots beating giant aliens, as massive structures crumble around them in a big crash of digital dust over the sound of the Inception horn, you need the best of both worlds.

Movie Review: X-Men The Days of Future Past

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1877832/

Directed By: Bryan Singer
Written By: Simon Kinberg

One of the most irritating things about the X-Men franchise is the fact that they did not plan ahead. After what happened in the Final Stand, it has been getting increasingly tough for the audience to make sense of the franchise's plot.

So, without any spoilers whatsoever, the story starts in the future. Now this is the time in the comic arc when the Trask's sentinels have taken over. And these are not the original sentinels but the final upgraded versions that are capable of shape shifting and absorbing other mutant's powers in order to one-up them. We see a rag-tag bunch of mutants trying to battle them. The entire setting of the movie feels rather inadequate. I, for one, never liked the final war in the Final Stand. I hated the fact that they killed a bunch of characters in 20 minutes of run time and hoped us to be sympathetic or display any sort of emotion whatsoever. The set up of the war in this movie is equally disappointing.

One, in case yo are watching it in iMax 3-D, you ll feel as if the final touches on the CGI were still to be done when the print was released. The sentinels have a terminator-ish feel to them. Apart from that the film tried to shove in two-mainstream characters from the comic books, Scarlett Witch and Quicksilver. Scarlett Witch comes as more of a shock to the audience, with her powers not very clearly explained and her character development literally starts and ends with the girl with eye-tattoos who made portals out of thin air. So, during the battle we discover that the mutants (Charles and Magneto combined) have decided to send Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) back into the past to stop Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence, who looks exquisite and acts even better) from murdering Trask (Peter Dinklage).

The explanation given is rather flimsy, Mystique murdering Trask was the triggering point of the Mutant-Sentinel war and stopping her from doing it is the only way to stop the carnage.

Now, movies based on comic books aren't exactly famous for their intelligent plots, so some leeway could be given there but apart from that the movie as a whole fails to establish a connect with the audience.

The reasons are many, Marvel has followed this formula in nearly every X-Men movie, there is always one evil human scientist/doctor/army general who wants to experiment on/weaponise mutants and has to be stopped. While the lore of Trask industries is very firmly established in the comic books, there are little, if any, differentiating factors from the older X-Men villains.

I will get a lot of hate for saying this, but the X-men heroes are getting old. They have failed to evolve and the constant muddling with the timelines has rendered them blank and one-dimensional. So now we have two actors playing Xavier and yet we can barely relate to him, let alone care about the fact that the dude was murdered in Final Stand and was in this movie somehow and was shot in the First Class and got his legs back in this movie and lost his powers. Although the movie does explain the complications, yet when you modify your characters at the drop of the hat, you become a little of everything and at the same time nothing.

All things said and done, Days of Future past has little to offer in terms of story and direction and acting. Still, if you are a fan of Trask industries, so watch it. You get to see two generations of Sentinels come alive on the big screen for the first time. You get to see Quicksilver in the famous kitchen scene, which by the way is the money shot of the entire movie. You get to see Jennifer Lawrence, in some really acrobatic fight scenes and you get to see Tyrion Lannister, with a mustache.

All in all, if you are a nerd/fanboy DoFP is a good one time watch.