Key Life Lessons to Channel Your Creative Mind | Ed Catmull EP 404

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:13What I'm curious about is how were you able to tap into the human mind and create emotional connections with audiences through these animations? How was this studied and executed for the last 30 years at such a high level? Well, I will say that for the first movie, it's one of those things where there is some luck in that group that first came in. We had always, in the history of both at New York Tech and then at Lucasfilm and then at Pixar, was to say we really want to hire the very best. And so I would say, well, we want to hire people who are smarter than I am. And I know other people say that, but because like, what does that even mean?

1:00but it means that you don't want to be threatened by the people that you hire and they just have to have these extraordinary skills. When they were building out our technical group, they were just really good. They had passed me in terms of their understanding of all the technology. And John understood that too. So when he did his first hires, the first person he hired was Andrew Stanton and then the second was Pete Docter and then Joe Ranf came in and then we brought in really to be an editor except he turns out to have been like one of the best storytellers ever is Lee Unkrich. This is this amazing group of people that came together.

1:49Part of it was we really had established a culture where this was the right thing to do is you aren't bringing in, you weren't even thinking about them as, okay, who's going to be second to me? It's like, okay, who's really good? And it turns out that Andrew was, had this extraordinarily structural sense. We didn't know that. Right, right. It's just like it emerged because of the challenge. And Pete Docter had this incredible emotional core. Getting the emotion right, it's like who he is. people aren't often aware of this but the lighting is really important for conveying the emotions the artist that we had Ralph Eggleston had a color palette for the movie because it turns out the basic color changed throughout the movie and it's this subtle thing that's affecting your perceptions wow so this is this amazing group of people and the interesting thing about it was that none of these people had ever made a feature film before in their life.

3:00Oh my goodness. So we hadn't used computer graphics, but they also hadn't done a 2D film. They hadn't done any film. Everybody is a beginner. They all had to figure it out. And you're leading them. Yeah. The emotions you're able to pull out of people, you know, in these films. through the text, through the art, through the color, through the lighting, through the sound design and the music, through the tonality of the voice actors, and bringing it all together to create a cohesive emotional story is unbelievable how you guys do this. But how did you know how to put it all together? I mean, the way I thought at the time was, is how do you have a group that work together.

3:46Because I'm not a filmmaker. Over time, we developed a way of helping people, which ended up being called the Brain Trust. But my view was, how do we make sure this group works together? Like, what are the things that make it work together? What takes them off the rails? So as to work out some principles for that, the truth was, there's only one movie, in all those movies that I gave a note that I felt so strongly about that I had to push really hard to get it in there. What was that? It was in Monsters Incorporated. What was the note? The note was, at one point near the end, the monster, Sully, has to scare this dummy, which is being video, that's like a training video.

4:32And you may recall that when he does this, he then looks up and he sees that the girl's right there and he scares the bejesus out of this little girl, the one he loves. And he didn't mean to do it. But the original thing, what she saw was that she saw him on the monitor. So I looked at this and I said, you can't do this because anybody that has a child remembers their times when they may have done something where their child was in danger, either because of themselves or it happened to them. And when that happens, it sears into your soul and you never forget it for as long as you live. Wow. And for Sully, he needs to see that he was the cause of the thing that scared her, that it was not good enough to have her see it by the monitor.

5:32and so I could look and say, well I did one at least. One note in 30 movies, yeah, yeah. But that wasn't my job. Yeah. They're the filmmakers. It wasn't my job. And so that was the whole time and then when Jim Morris came in, we were both like, you know, we're in there just looking at the process and what works, what doesn't work. Right. You're just evolving it. Right, it's over time.

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6:52Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.