Disney – Page 3 – artdiamondblog.com

Workers Want to See Compensation Related to Contribution

This is a great example contra (or at least qualifying) Daniel Pink’s claim that all you need do for knowledge workers is provide them enough money so that they can provide for the basic needs of themselves and their family.

(p. 145) The public offering process brought details of the intended allocation of Pixar stock options into view. A registration statement and other documents with financial data had to be prepared for the Securities and Exchange Commission and a prospectus needed to be made ready for potential investors. These documents had to be reviewed and edited, and it was here that the word apparently leaked: A small number of people were to receive low-cost options on enormous blocks of stock. Catmull, Levy, and Lasseter were to get options on 1.6 million shares apiece; Guggenheim and Reeves were to get 1 million and 840,000, respectively. If the company’s shares sold at the then-planned price of fourteen dollars, the men would be instant multimillionaires.

The revelation was galling. Apart from the money, there was the symbolism: The options seemed to denigrate the years of work everyone else had put into the company. They gave a hollow feel to Pixar’s labor-of-love camaraderie, its spirit that everyone was there to do cool work together. Also, it was hard not to notice that Levy, one of the top recipients, had just walked in the door.
“There was a big scene about all that because some people got (p. 146) huge amounts more than other people who had come at the same time period and who had made pretty significant contributions to the development of Pixar and the ability to make Toy Story,” Kerwin said. “People like Tom Porter and Eben Ostby and Loren Carpenter–guys that had been there since the beginning and were part of the brain trust.”
Garden-variety employees would also get some options, but besides being far fewer, those options would vest over a four-year period. Even employees who had been with the organization since its Lucasfilm days a decade earlier–employees who had lost all their Pixar stock in the 1991 reorganization–would be starting their vesting clock at zero. In contrast, most of the options of Catmull, Lasseter, Guggenheim, and Reeves vested immediately–they could be turned into stock right away.
“I decided, ‘Well, gee, I’ve been at this company eight years, and I’ll have been here twelve years before I’m fully vested,’ ” one former employee remembered. ” ‘It doesn’t sound like these guys are interested in my well-being.’ A lot of this piled up and made me say, ‘What am I doing? I’m sitting around here trying to make Steve Jobs richer in ways he doesn’t even appreciate.’ ”

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: italics in original.)
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)

For Daniel Pink’s views, see:
Pink, Daniel H. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. New York: Riverhead Books, 2009.

Add to Your List of Marketing Mistakes

(p. 142) The consumer products arm of Disney–the group responsible for licensing toys and other tie-ins–was also slow to see the potential of Toy Story. It was a case of out of sight, out of mind: Toy Story was in production hundreds of miles away. Preoccupied with two other forthcoming releases, Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Disney Consumer Products left the Pixar film on the back burner. When Guggenheim met with one of the division’s senior licensing executives in December 1994, he was alarmed to discover that she saw no licensing potential in the film.
“We put together a presentation reel of scenes from the film that we’d already completed, and material on how the film was being made” Guggenheim said. “We were taking that around the company so people could get a feeling of what this film was all about.”
The executive told him, I don’t know how we’re going to do toys for this.
“What do you mean?” Guggenheim queried. “It’s Toy Story. You know, Toy . . . Story.”
Yes, she said, but you have all these toys that already exist–Mr. Potato Head, Speak & Spell, all that stuff. How are we ever going to make money off that?
“But you have all these original characters. You’ve got Buzz, you’ve got Woody.”

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: ellipsis and italics in original.)
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit Returned to Disney After 78 Years

Do you recognize this rabbit? Source of image: online version of the Omaha World-Herald article quoted and cited below.

The story of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit is one of entrepreneurial resilience. Walt Disney was duped out of his legal rights to Oswald. Instead of fighting it out in court, or giving in to discouragement, he shortened Oswald’s ears and transformed him into a mouse with a new name.

(p. 2E) LOS ANGELES (AP) – One of Walt Disney’s oldest drawings is seeing the light of day after being locked away for nearly 40 years.

A rough 1928 image of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, the wacky predecessor to Mickey Mouse, was brought out of the Walt Disney Co. archive this week and showcased at an event unveiling “Disney Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two,” an upcoming action-adventure game for the Wii, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 that allows players to control both Mickey and Oswald.
The mischievous Oswald was co-created by Disney before Mickey, but he was lost in a 1928 contract dispute with Universal Studios. Oswald hopped back to Disney in 2006 when CEO Bob Iger brokered a deal that sent sportscaster Al Michaels to Universal-NBC. Oswald’s first appearance since his return came in 2010’s “Epic Mickey” as the ruler of a forgotten realm.

For the full story, see:

DERRIK J. LANG. “Disney image displayed for first time in 40 years.” Omaha World-Herald (Sun., March 18, 2012): 2E.

Lasseter’s Success Came from Seeing How the Details Affected the Storytelling

(p. 138) “I had no reason to think it would be any good,” recalled Barzel, who was then a recently minted California Institute of Technology Ph.D. on the lighting team. “I knew John was absolutely brilliant as a animator of shorts. But I’ve read authors who write good short stories and crummy novels; I figured it’s a different skill. I had no reason to think John would have the skill to pull off a full-length movie.”
He expected something that animators and animation buffs might find interesting, but that probably would not have a particularly wide audience.
“I joined because I wanted the practical experience,” he said, “I thought, Well, it’s going to be the first full-length [computer-animated] movie, so it’ll be a fun thing to have been associated with, however it turns out.”
What finally made Barzel a believer was watching Lasseter at work. He found that Lasseter had an uncanny ability to shift between the macro level of the entire film and the micro level of whatever detail he was dealing with at the moment. “Looking at an individual frame — it’s meticulous work– he would always be aware of its role in the larger context of storytelling,” Barzel recalled. “He’d say something like, ‘This is the first time this character responds to that situation; it’s really important that he get the right glint in his eye.’ ” Barzel started to think, John knows what he’s doing. This movie could be really good.

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: italics and brackets in original.)
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)

“Being Able to Work on a Great Project”

(p. 133) Recruiting was brisk; the magnet for talent was not the pay, generally mediocre, but rather the allure of taking part in the first fully computer-animated feature film. “Disney gave us a very modest budget [$17.5 million] for Toy Story,” Guggenheim said. “Although that budget went up progressively over time, it didn’t afford for very high salaries, unfortunately. We tried to make the other working conditions better. Just the enthusiasm of being able to work on a great project is as often as not what attracts artists and animators.”

Lasseter’s Epiphany: “This Is What Walt Was Waiting For”

(p. 52) In a trailer on the Disney lot, Lasseter huddled with Rees and Kroyer to look at the first computer-generated scene to come in–a race among drivers in virtual motorcycles known as light cycles. The scene had no character animation and its graphics were rudimentary, but it brought Lasseter an epiphany. The dimensionality of the scene was something he had never witnessed before. If this technology could be melded with Disney animation, he thought, he would have the makings of a revolution. Until then, three-dimensional effects in animation had required difficult, costly sessions with the multistory “multiplane” camera, practical for only a few key sequences in a film, if that. The computers could even move the audience’s point of view around a scene like a Steadicam. The possibilities seemed infinite.
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” he said later. “Walt Disney, all his career, all his life, was striving to get more dimension in his (p. 53) animation . . . and I was standing there, looking at it, going, ‘This is what Walt was waiting for.'”
He was not able to interest the animation executives in it; they did not care to hear about new technology unless it made animation faster or cheaper.

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: ellipsis in original.)
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)

CalArts Was One of Walt Disney’s Last Projects

It is a nice minor coda to Walt Disney’s life that the CalArts school that he founded provided a starting point for many of the next generation of great innovative animators, including John Lasseter.

(p. 47) CalArts was Walt Disney’s brainchild; he had started the planning of the school in the late 1950s and provided generously for it in his will. Walt and his brother Roy formed it in 1961 through a merger of two struggling Los Angeles institutions, the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music and the Chouinard Art Institute. The doors opened at the school’s consolidated campus in Valencia in 1971, five years after Walt’s death.
. . .
(p. 48) The storms of the 1960s had mostly receded by the time Lasseter arrived. At CalArts, he found his own kind of liberation: Here, he no longer needed to conceal his passion for cartoons. His twenty classmates from across the country were animation geeks like him. Others had been corresponding with the Disney studio just as he had, and even making their own short films. Many would go on from CalArts to perform significant work at Disney or elsewhere; among them were future stars John Musker (co-director of Aladdin, Hercules, and The Little Mermaid) and Brad Bird.
First-year classes took place in room A113, a windowless space with white walls, floor, and ceiling, and buzzing fluorescent lights. The teachers made up tor the setting, however: Almost all of them were longtime Disney artists with awe-inspiring animation credits. Kendall O’Connor, an art director on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, taught layout; Elmer Plummer, a character designer on Dumbo, taught life drawing; T. Hee, a sequence director on Pinocchio, taught caricature. The program was rigorous and the hours long; the fact that the campus was in the middle of nowhere made it easier to focus on work. Tim Burton, who entered the program the following year, remembered the experience: . . .

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: ellipsis added; italics in original.)
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)

Funding Was Scarce to Develop Computer Graphics

(p. 29) As in Catmull’s graduate school days, however, the Walt Disney Co. was not interested in computer graphics. Walt had died of cancer in 1966, and the company was now run by a caretaker chief executive, Esmond Cardon “Card” Walker. Some of Disney’s technology experts saw great promise in the NYIT group’s work, but that was as far as it ever went.
Who else had pockets deep enough to support a major research effort into computer animation for filmmaking? It might take a decade, or even longer, before computer costs came down enough for (p. 30) a feature film to be anywhere near the realm of possibility. The only option, it seemed, was to keep making progress on the technical issues–on NYIT’s dime–while waiting for Disney to call.

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)

“What Success Had Brought Him, . . . , Was Freedom”

(p. 5) The success of Pixar’s films had brought him something exceedingly rare in Hollywood: not the house with the obligatory pool in the backyard and the Oscar statuettes on the fireplace mantel, or the country estate, or the vintage Jaguar roadster–although he had all of those things, too. It wasn’t that he could afford to indulge his affinity for model railroads by acquiring a full-size 1901 steam locomotive, with plans to run it on the future site of his twenty-thousand-square-foot mansion in Sonoma Valley wine country. (Even Walt Dìsney’s backyard train had been a mere one-eighth-scale replica.)
None of these was the truly important fruit of Lasseter’s achievements. What success had brought him, most meaningfully, was freedom. Having created a new genre of film with his colleagues at Pixar, he had been able to make the films he wanted to make, and he was coming back to Disney on his own terms.

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: ellipsis in title was added.)
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)

Creativity Continues at Disney

“‘We’re kind of like an old married couple,’ said Imagineer Chris Crump, center, of his longtime colleague Larry Nikolai, right. Lisa Girolami, the ride’s producer, is left. It took nearly four years to conceive and build ‘Ariel’s Undersea Adventure,’ which opened at Disney California Adventure Park last week. The trio spearheaded a group of over 100 designers, architects, lighting experts and other specialists.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. C11) It took nearly four years to conceive and build a theme-park ride that put visitors inside the world of “The Little Mermaid,” including several musical numbers, a few key narrative moments and 184 figures from Disney’s animated hit.

And that followed the 18 years it took to settle on an approach to the ride, which was on the entertainment giant’s to-do list almost from the day the film was released in 1989. The ride finally opened last week at Disney California Adventure, Disneyland’s younger neighbor, and takes visitors through a condensed version of the movie’s narrative, cramming nine scenes and four songs into 5½ minutes.
. . .
They start by thinking big: Ms. Girolami described their brainstorming sessions as “an iterative process”–first deciding what parts of the movie to retell, then returning to the drawing table as the decision-making focuses to smaller and smaller details.
Then, helped by “rapid prototyping,” a technology that allows them to generate physical models directly from computer-design files, the group tests and retests their models.
. . .
The Imagineers pride themselves on their never-say-die spirit. “We commit to things creatively that haven’t been done,” Ms. Girolami said. “Someone will say, ‘That’s never been done before,’ and it’s our job to say, ‘Great–let’s do it.’ “

For the full story, see:
Ethan Smith. “CREATING; Taking the Little Mermaid for a Spin.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., JUNE 4, 2011): C11.
(Note: ellipses added.)