Building Pixar, Working With Steve Jobs, and Cultivating Creativity | Ed Catmull
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摘要
Ed Catmull is the co-founder of Pixar and the former president of Disney Animation.
He grew up in 1950s Utah wanting to animate for Disney. Convinced he couldn't draw well enough, he studied physics and computer science at the University of Utah instead, landing in one of the great talent incubators in computing history. In 1972, he animated his own left hand—one of the first 3D computer renderings ever made. Since childhood he had carried a single ambition: to make the first feature film animated entirely by computer. Reaching it took more than 20 years.
George Lucas hired Catmull in 1979 to build a computer division at Lucasfilm. When Lucas needed cash, Steve Jobs bought that division in 1986 for $5 million and spun it out as Pixar. For years it sold imaging computers and lost money while Catmull and John Lasseter made short films to keep the dream alive. Jobs sank roughly $50 million of his own money into it. In 1995, Pixar released Toy Story, the first feature animated entirely by computer, and went public days later. Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, WALL-E, and Up followed. Disney bought Pixar in 2006 for $7.4 billion and put Catmull in charge of both studios; he revived a faltering Disney Animation with films like Frozen.
Catmull cared about the conditions that let creative work survive its own fragility. Every original idea, he argues, starts out ugly and broken, and management exists to protect it long enough to get good. At Pixar that meant the Braintrust: a room where directors got blunt feedback with no authority attached and the conversation stayed on the problem, never on who was right. He laid it all out in Creativity, Inc.
Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/ed-catmull
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Chapters
00:00:00 Most Companies Are Full Of Shit
00:04:28 The Brain Trust Mechanism
00:10:13 Why Steve Jobs Was Banned From The Braintrust
00:17:48 Your Job Is To Manage The Dynamics
00:23:27 Betting The Company On Toy Story
00:24:35 Engineering Eisner's Worst Nightmare
00:36:51 Bob Iger's Crappy Hand
00:38:44 Why Disney Never Asked What Pixar Was Doing
00:43:48 Take The Hard Problem
00:44:38 The Director Can't Lose The Team
00:48:48 Quality Is The Best Business Plan
00:52:32 What Walt Disney Taught Him
00:59:25 George Lucas And The Motion Blur Problem
01:08:48 Now What's The Point Of My Life
01:13:31 How Much Of This Was Me
01:16:10 George Lucas Wanted The Whole Industry Healthy
01:25:11 Refusing To Let Anyone Feel Second Class
01:32:38 The Truck In The Building
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