My original DVD, purshased a few years ago, was a moving casualty but that gave me an excuse to go out and buy the new Collectors Edition (Amazon, Netflix), which contains a pretty awesome audio commentary detailing the highly collaborative and iterative process used to create the film.  While not exactly invoking a well defined methodoligy like Agile, as we might use on a software product these days, Burton, director Henry Selick, and composer/’80s icon Danny Elfman working model had some interesting twists to it that anybody can learn from.

Tim Burton started his career as a front line animator for Disney during the early 80s.  It was at this time that he had the idea that ultimately became The Nightmare Before Christmas.  As a lowly animator, though, the idea of a holiday story mashup shot in the expensive stop motion style of the beloved Rankin/Bass holiday specials didn’t exactly resonate with the folks in power.  But a funny thing happens to you when you go on to direct money makers like Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, and Batman: people listen to you.

And so the idea was revived in the early 90s, but without a script.  One thing Burton knew, though, was that he wanted it to be a musical in the same way that the Rankin/Bass stories were, so he turned to his frequent collaborator Elfman.  The story would be told through the music, so Burton wanted to start there before any other writing took place.

In the audio commentary, Elfman describes how the two would work:

• Starting at the beginning, Burton, in a very animated and passionate way, would describe the story while frequently referring to the concept art he drew.
• As the sole audience member for this performance, Elfman would find the genesis of a song in the presentation and at the end of a story segment would kick Burton out of the room.
• Before he could lose his inspiration, Elfman wrote down the rough song components that popped into his head while hearing Burton’s rendition of the events.
• After 2 or 3 days of refining, Elfman would invite Burton back to hear a rough cut of a song for that segment, which would get refined slightly, and the process would continue for the next segment of the film.

Meanhile, director Selick was overseeing the development of the sets and the puppets to be used during the stop action filming, again without a script.  Instead, he would get delivery of full songs with the final actor singing voices in them from Elfman so that character mouths could be synchronized correctly.  Occasionally, a production need would necessitate Elfman doing some rewriting and rerecording, so the cycle would iterate back to the songwriter again.

The best example of this can be found in the “Making Christmas” scene, where the Halloween town characters, used to a world where scaring people is the norm, are comically bad at creating Christmas presents like hats made out of fresh roadkill and toy bullet ridden toy ducks.  Selick felt the rediculousness of the scene would be heigthened if he could edit the segment so that the well intentioned but poorly executed efforts of the Halloween town crowd was juxtaposed against the more familiar preparations of North Pole elves by intercutting the two.  The orignal song was completely comprised of Halloweentown characters, though, and such an enhancement to the final product required reworking of the song that acompanied the sequence.

And so this dual phase iterative process, with different players pushing on and inspiring each other, continued throughout the making of the film.  The Nightmare Before Chirstmas went on to be a critical and box office (it has profited over $50 million to date) success with an annual following, puntuated by a seasonal makeover of Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion (a ride-through of which is also part of the Collector’s Edition bonus features).

“Filmed entirely on location on Oahu, Hawaii.”

Given that most of the shows plot occurs in a tropical jungle environment, in order to get realism into every shot, it completely makes sense to have principle photography done in an actual tropical location. But, as the “Fire + Water: Anatomy of an Episode” bonus feature on Lost Season 2, Disk 7 tells us, the requirement to have these realistic shots has a ripple effect on other parts of the production.

Just like some requirement on your project might have a ripple effect on aspects of your design.

Although an episode of Lost airs every 7 days, it takes 24 days to make an episode once the script has been finalized. While much of the work is done in parallel, the Hawaiian location provides some challenges for most of the staff in one way or another.

Choosing locations for the main timeline of the show that occurs on the island is hard enough (some locations are revisited while others have to be original to advance new story elements), but the real difficulty is in the flashback or flashforward segments. Since the cast is so internationally emphasized, parts of Hawaii have to double for places all over the world, like London in the “Fire + Water” episode.

How in the heck do you get a street in Honolulu to look like England? That’s where the magic of artists and prop masters, who have a shop there locally, do their thing. A subway sign here, a billboard for ale there, a few British made cars parked on the curb, and you have your London street outside Charlie’s flat he shares with brother Liam.

While it is hard on the staff that prepares and shoots episodes in Hawaii, a similar set of stresses is placed on the post production staff. At a specific time in the late Hawaiian afternoon, whatever film has been shot for the day has to be driven to the airport and flown overnight to Los Angeles. The next morning, a production assistant picks up the package and gets the film developed in the early morning so that by the afternoon, the editing staff can begin to splice in footage for the episode with other pieces that arrived on previous days.

Music, digital effects, foley artists, and color adjusting all have to add their pieces, typically in parallel, by around 6 days after shooting has concluded. Since much of the shooting is done outdoors, often times the original dialog recorded on set cannot be used because of background noise levels (wind, surf, etc.). That means actors have to go back rerecord dialog to match their earlier performance.

Where are the actors? Back in Hawaii. So, a near finished version of the episode has to be shipped back to the islands where the new audio tracks are created, which are then flown back to LA where they are properly mixed before final delivery to the network.

When all that is done? Here comes the daily film delivery for the next episode.

On the surface, it seems like a simple solution to film a show about survivors of a plane crash on a tropical island on an actual tropical island. But the ramifications of that decision sure effect a lot of other things, just like there always seems to be that one requirement that makes other parts of your project more difficult.

Enter John Lasseter. Famous now for being the director of the Toy Story films, among others, Lasseter came to Pixar from Disney and helped produce the first short on the disc, Andre and Wally B.:

Pixar-Adventures of Andre and Wally B. – Click here for another funny movie. Cutting edge for the time, the characters exhibited emotion and were made of more sophisticated polygons than the normal spheres and cubes. What emerged in that film was a method of working that continued throughout the graphics revolution that Pixar led that also highlights the synergy that can be achieved by incorporating a perspective (in this case, a trained artist) very different from the one the technical staff producing the software had.The cone shape of humanoid character in Andre and Wally B., so the featurette tells us, was a result of Lasseter asking for more artistic freedom. “Can you give me a. . . “ became a common way for him to start a conversation with his software developer teammates. Because Lasseter was trying to optimize the power of the storytelling, as opposed to the complexity of the processing, he and the team were able to make functionality leaps that otherwise wouldn’t have been possible.

While some of the shorts on the disc were created as extra content for selling two disc sets of theatrical releases of movies like Cars and Monsters, Inc. most of the content is a result of cutting edge prototyping. After leaving the shorts for several years, the studio realized that they provided younger staff members an ideal environment to unlock creativity and gain experience in a relatively risk-free environment.

My favorite short on the disc is Knick Knack, which I saw at a cartoon film festival at the La Jolla Museum of Art in 1989 at the end of my freshman year of college. It is based on a habit that Lasetter’s wife has of collecting knick knacks from every place they go on vacation and features an original song by the then very hot Bobby McFerrin. Also worth noting, I happened to see Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park’s Creature Comforts at the same festival. In hindsight, to see two sets of work that would later become prominent was very, very cool.

Pixar-Knick Knack – A funny movie is a click awayTo put the available technology in perspective, I had my trusty 286 IBM PC clone with it’s 20 megabyte hard drive back at my on campus apartment when I saw this for the first time. I wrote term papers on it and played a lot of Larry Bird and Dr. J Go 1 on 1. the breakthrough for this film was the buoyancy of the floating snowflakes, which must have been a major undertaking. A “PG” version of this (one in which the breasts of the female characters no longer abnormally large) appeared as a bonus on the Finding Nemo two disc set a few years ago, so it may be familiar to you if you are a fan of that film.And, if you now have Bobby McFerrin songs stuck in your head after watching that video, you’re welcome. Don’t worry, be happy.

Building prototypes is among the funnest things to do in my job and it was very satisfying to see the progression of the combination of technology and artistry, with a heavy dose of commentary, from the people who made it all happen. Together and using the lessons they learned from these short films, they changed the way animation is done.

• Cropping the story line of an 83 minute movie into a 4 minute theme park attraction.
• Incorporating scent and touch elements that cannot be experienced in a movie theater but can in a dark ride, but in a way that is consistent with the storytelling that the guest is accustom to since they have likely seen the film already.
• Taking riders from a land environment to an undersea one in a believable way without getting them drenched.
• Using conceptual drawings, paper cutout models, and fully sculpted models during the design process to approximate the experience as much as possible so that changes can be made inexpensively.

Whatever your creative process might be, it’s always a good idea to study someone else’s to look for ways to improve and there’s few places that do it better than Disney Imagineering does. The people interviewed come across as passionate and extremely knowledgeable about what they do for a living. Normally, the resulting attraction needs to endure millions of riders over many, many years, but in the case of this project, it was canceled and only lived on in this DVD form.

Until two weeks ago, that is.

The Pixar merger has changed the structure of the Disney corporation pretty significantly. Most notably, hugely successful director John Lasseter is now the creative head of the theme parks and, as a former Jungle Cruise skipper, understands why an influx of new experiences is crucial to their profitability. As part of a huge overhaul of the underwhelming California Adventure that Disney announced on October 17, a Little Mermaid dark ride is set to replace the Whoopie Goldberg narrated “Golden Dreams” attraction.

While you can find behind the scenes footage of existing attractions on the Travel Channel on almost any given weekend, because this was a project that was stopped and restarted, it is the first detailed look at a Disney ride prior to it being constructed. Aside from the insight to the Disney creative process, that’s what makes this Disk 2 footage extra exciting.

I don’t have anywhere near the chemistry background or know enough about aerodynamics to know how realistic the progression of rockets is, but it the actual Homer Hickam (who eventually became an engineer for NASA after going to Virginia Tech) was a technical adviser and it all seemed reasonable to me. In the end, a whole bunch of people help the group out (including the disapproving father) when a key part is stolen and everything is happy. It’s a moving story about overcoming adversity with enough science to keep it interesting throughout.

• ABC executives have an offsite at the worst Disney theme park in the United States (that would be Disney’s California Adventure, trust my expertise on that one) and each is required to pitch 3 story ideas. Lloyd Braun, the head of ABC TV (not to be confused with the Seinfeld character of the same name) has the following idea: “Let’s do Cast Away, the series except with more people”. This brilliant insight goes to the next step i the series genesis process and has nothing to do with the fact that it’s the boss’ idea 8).
• The first writing team gets stuck and since this is 2004, when there’s a writing problem at ABC, the answer is to call J.J. Abrams.
• Abrams realizes that the show can’t just be about people crashing on an island, but there needs to be some mystery about the people and the island itself. So much so that the island becomes a character. He tells the executive team he’s interested in working on the series, but needs help because of his other commitments. This isn’t a problem except he tells them this at 6:30 pm on a Friday and he needs a head writer by the following Monday.
• That sound you hear is the executive team flipping through their web of personal networks to find a creative writer whose personality fits Abrams’ and would be available on a moments notice. The name they come up with: Damon Lindelof.
• Making a good impression your first day with a new group of people is important. Lindelof selects a vintage Star Wars Bantha Tracks t-shirt that day that Abrams loves and they immediately hit it off. Abrams described the meeting as, “He was immediately, like, someone who I couldn’t stand I didn’t already know.” They found their ideas for the mystery of the show to be in sync and spent the next week outlining the high points of the first 5 or 6 seasons of the show along with Abrams team of writers from Alias.

There’s a ton of other good stuff on the disk, but that first story struck a chord with me. Every honorable Lost fan knows who David Lindelof is now, but that only came about because Abrams found a grain of a good idea in a less than inspired suggestion made by an executive, a personal network that made him a candidate for an assignment he had no way of knowing about, and a first impression that built a kinship with a powerful creative mind at ABC.

While the whole movie is great, for me, three parts in particular stand out as comedy gold:

• When Neal and Del have to share a hotel room in Wichita, Neal makes the mistake of letting Del take a shower first. When the water pressure suddenly shuts down while he has soap in his face, Neal flees to the bathroom sink, which is filled with water, as salvation. Only when opening his eyes does he discover that Del’s dirty socks were soaking in the basin. Eeew. Then, he realizes that Del has used all the towels and he must dry himself off with a washcloth (we’ve all been there).
• Their ride from the Wichita hotel to the bus station is provided by Owen, the son of the hotel owner. Upon greeting Neal, he spits tobacco juice and wipes the excess off his face with his right hand, which he then uses to shake hands with Neal, all in one well-practiced motion.
• In the movie’s definitive scene (and the one that got it an R rating), Steve Martin deals with a less-than-helpful rental car clerk with a powerful monologue that features the f-word 19 times. I think everyone wishes they could, just once, say these things to a really bad customer service representative.

So, the next time you get stuck on that O’Hare layover and the line at Chili’s is over an hour long, remind yourself that things could be worse: You could be traveling with Del Griffith. You can either laugh or cry in situations like that. Hopefully, thinking of this movie will induce the former.

When Walt had the idea to create Disneyland, he didn’t have the money for it. To subsidize the construction of the original theme park, he made a deal with ABC to create a series for their then fledgling network. Entitled “Disneyland”, the series would eventually be called “Wonderful World of Color” and “Wonderful World of Disney” in its various incarnations over the years primarily shown on Sunday nights in the US. The original installment was an anthology series that, each week, featured a show cleverly themed to one of the lands at Disneyland.

Advantureland themed shows depicted nature programs that would become film staples of my elementary school education, Frontierland had the Adventures of Davy Crockett, and Fantasyland would show one of the animated feature films. It was essentially a weekly infomercial for the park, but the show was wildly popular. The Tomorrowland segments dealt with futurism as it existed in the 1950s and helped make Wernher Von Braun become a household name as the space race gripped the American public. The Walt Disney Treasures: Tomorrowland DVD set contains selected episodes from the Tomorrowland part of the anthology, including an accurate prediction of how whether satellites would be used and how the Space Shuttle program would eventually feature a reusable rocket and glider system.

Honestly, most of the episodes are pretty boring but the real gem of the set is the original “EPCOT Video” that appears on Disk 2. During the mid 1960s as the company began to buy up land in central Florida for what became Walt Disney World, Walt had the space and buffer he couldn’t get when Disneyland was built. But he wanted something else: complete autonomy.

Everything ever built at Disneyland has been subject to building codes. Lots of them. What Walt wanted in Orlando was an unprecedented exception to those codes and the EPCOT Video was created with the express purpose of obtaining exactly that from the Florida state legislature. He had big plans for building what he called the Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow (EPCOT) (which was very different from the EPCOT theme park that was eventually built) and to do that, he needed freedom to construct things his own way.

The EPCOT Video was never shown to the public in its entirety until this DVD was released and it was the last piece of film shot of Walt Disney before he died. It was shown to leaders in Florida and the Walt Disney Company was granted the autonomy they wanted, essentially acting as their own county within the state of Florida. Through the magic of YouTube, you can watch the video right now and learn from what are still good presentation foundations today, but were unmatched in the mid 1960s when it was shot.

The first part (about 5 minutes, embedded below or use this link), establishes Disney’s credibility in urban design, transportation, and a few other areas. It says to its audience, “we know what we’re doing” without being condescending, which is a key part to any idea you want to get across to someone else.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkT2iLetCTc

The second part (about 10 minutes, embedded below or use this link) introduces Walt Disney in the exact same manner that he was introduced on TV every Sunday night with even the same voice-over actor being used. This is intentional, as it puts the audience at ease with this familiar face. Notice how Walt begins to explain his extremely complicated concept of a prototypical city in very plain language. He introduces the EPCOT acronym and explains where it comes from multiple times. Remember too that this was made at the height of the Cold War and is the reason for him bringing up American ingenuity multiple times in an effort to make his points more sympathetic against the unmentioned common foe of communism.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxC_a7qnGi8

The third part (another 10 minutes or so, embedded below or use this link) goes into the details of what EPCOT is with video effects that perhaps only Disney was capable of at the time. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a demo is worth a million. Walt’s animators and concept artists demonstrate the ideas of a futuristic city in a way that anybody can understand.

Overall, a lot can be learned from this video. It does a great job of establishing credibility of the Disney company in urban development, citing several external sources in the process. Then the plan is laid out in concept first before details are presented with the help of compelling animation. That’s not to say you should bone up on your cartooning skills for your next presentation to management, but analyze how this video approached its very complicated problem and held its audiences hand through the argument being made. That’s where you can take something away from this and apply it to your job right now.As an epilogue, it’s worth noting that as a direct result of this video, the Reedy Creek Improvement District was created to govern the land Walt Disney World sits on. The original concept of EPCOT was morphed into the theme park of the same name and a much smaller housing development called Celebration, Florida was eventually built instead.

Setting the bar high for yourself is important in any career, but often times for engineers, some technological breakthrough that nobody thinks will work is at the center of such things. To achieve those goals, you have to believe in that dream. A lot. Rent creator Jonathan Larson, who I’m betting you’ve never heard of, is the poster child for holding onto a dream, showing a level perseverance that most people don’t have (myself included).

The plot of Rent is a modern update Puccini’s opera La boheme that replaces Paris’ 1800s era tuberculosis epidemic with AIDS in New York City’s East Village near the end of the 20th century. While you may be tempted to cure insomnia with that sentence, if you give Disk 2 of movie edition (Netflix, Amazon) a chance, you will be inspired by Larson’s commitment to his goals and struck by his bittersweet success as told by the documentary about his life.

I am a converted “Broadway person” by virtue of being married to one since 1994. She watches the NFL with me, I spent many Sunday matinées at the Pantages, which has become the de facto home for US touring theatre companies in Los Angeles, where we recently moved from. As such, I got exposed to a lot of things that I otherwise would not have in this branch of the arts. Some of them are as boring as can be, but many are moving in a way that other art forms simply cannot be. Rent tells a complicated story through a ensemble of deep characters and varied musical styles. Most of the original cast went onto bigger and better things, notably Jessie L. Martin of Law & Order fame and Taye Diggs, about whom my wife always says, “Now there’s an attractive man.”

While nearly all of those folks returned for the movie version in 2005 (which didn’t translate well to the screen and did poorly at the box office), the more interesting entry found on the DVD set is the story behind the story on Disk 2.

Jonathan Larson took a job at a diner waiting tables (with Martin) when he graduated from college intent on fulfilling his dream of writing Broadway musicals. He made just enough to get by while spending most of his time writing in an East Village apartment that probably should have been condemned. His pre-Rent successes were few, but he was happy pursuing what he thought he was meant to do.

There’s nothing terribly unique about that part of his story. Lots of New York City artists meander along this path. What is unique is how long he did it and how his story ended. After hundreds of rejection letters, do you have enough spirit and faith in your abilities to carry on? How long do you keep the dream alive before turning your attention to a more “normal” life? 3 years? 5? 7?

In Larson’s case, the answer was 14 years. I don’t know about you, but I feel ready to chuck things like this blog on a pretty regular basis and I’m not sure I’ve ever believed in anything enough to spend a decade and a half of people telling me I suck at it while living in a crappy apartment where the bathtub was in the kitchen. But in Larson’s story, he did exactly that and kept on chugging away at his dream.

It is here where the bittersweet part of his story begins. In a sequence of events that you couldn’t make up and have anybody believe you, Larson was finally able to find an off-Broadway theater that was interested in his material. He worked many months fine-tuning the piece that eventually became Rent in the form we now know it. Then, tragedy struck.

On January 25, 1996 after the final rehearsal with the full cast prior to the preview of the finished show the next day, Jonathan Larson collapsed of a heart attack and died at the age of 35. His death was likely caused by Marfan Syndrome and the preview went on as planned since those close to him were convinced he would have wanted it to.

Rent became a success beyond anything Larson could have imagined. Posthumously, his work won the Obie, the Tony, and even the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It is the third-longest-running musical currently on Broadway and has had productions all over the world in as many languages as you can think of.

All because a guy believed in what he was doing when nobody else did. No matter what, he just kept going. The next time you feel like giving up on something, think about how Jonathan Larson never did and didn’t get to live long enough to see the fruits of his labor.

The same man that brought you clever humor in the form of Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill focuses his comedy acumen at the technology workplace in Office Space (Netflix, Amazon). Through the eyes of Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston), we see Judge’s dead on depictions of late 1990′s software engineering life that invokes the spirit of Scott Adams, including:

• Being caught in traffic so dense that an old man using a walker moves faster
• Pointless paperwork through infamous TPS reports
• Mid-level managers who pay more attention to their coffee than their employees
• Demented network printers that unleash their annoyance at will
• Intricacies of ultra-perky coworkers and their anti-social counterparts
• The ratio of people-to-cake never being correct for workplace celebrations

But then something magical happens to our good friend Peter. Prompted by a hypnotic accident, he simply decides not to care any more and does all the things we all wish we could do, like:

• Embracing a new dress code of flip flops and jeans
• Taking apart his cubicle walls in order to improve his view
• Inadvertently convincing the consultants who came in to lay off everybody that he is, instead, worthy of a raise and a promotion
• Blowing off his boss, proclaiming to be busy while playing Tetris and eating Cheetos

You can’t possibly watch this movie without thinking, “That’s just like something that happened at my work” multiple times. Whenever I have an especially frustrating stretch at work, this is among the first titles I reach for when finding salvation. Keeping your mental batteries recharged is a key component to a long technology career and this movie certainly helps when that’s what I need.