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Pixar in a Box: the art of storytelling

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Re: Pixar in a Box: the art of storytelling

#71

Post by kop316 »

jedimastert wrote: post #33
kop316 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may have to rewatch it, but I recall that movie being fairly entertaining, even as an adult. I also will say I went to watch it without having seen the original Cars, so perhaps I really had no expectations for the film (other than it was a Pixar film)?

I've not had any interest in it, so I haven't really say through it. The weird thing is that Cars has this emotional center around facades and regret and abandonment and the differences between the journey and the destination and it's this beautiful look into a town that got bypassed. And more to the point it has this emotional weight that was still really accessible to a young me that a lot of other kids studios did…

> but it felt so outside the Pixar brand, like something Disney or Dreamworks or any other studio would make.

Maybe that's why they wanted to do it, to try something different?

I have always found the Pixar Shorts to be some of their best story telling. They don't have a lot of time, and don't seem to be afraid of trying new ways to tell a story, or a different type of story.

Re: Pixar in a Box: the art of storytelling

#72

Post by tbabb »

tomthe wrote: post #17

If you don't have time for the full course, here is a hn-comment [0] that I really, really appreciated and helped me when telling stories to my kids: >Yes. Pixar has a template: >Once upon a time there was ___. >Every day, ___. >One day ___. >Because of that, ___. >Because of that, ___. >Until finally ___. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20408283 edit: it may have been another comment from here: https://hn.…

I think the original source of that formula in relation to Pixar storytelling is from here: https://twitter.com/lawnrocket/status/201018115604230146

(The twitter account of a then-Pixar story artist).

Re: Pixar in a Box: the art of storytelling

#73

Post by Closi »

jimbob45 wrote: post #68
wegs wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frozen teaches kids all the wrong lessons. Shirk your responsibilities. Ignore your community. Focus on yourself. "Let it Go" is like an ode to everything I dislike about American culture. It's so very American. Best animated movie I've seen in the past decade was probably Moana, but I can't say I've seen many.

I’m fairly sure they created “Let it go” before they really knew what the story would be about. They knew it was a snowy movie, knew they wanted something to rhyme with the traditional “Let it snow”, and vaguely had the idea that an angsty girl would be singing the song. As a result, the lyrics are incredibly generic and hardly seem to fit her specific situation.

You are half right, according to the song writer Robert Lopez the original movie structure and plan just had the placeholder title “Elsa’s Badass Song” and he was told to go write it, and then came up with let it go.

But it was still very early in the process and it was the first song to be written that actually made it into the movie. The extended soundtrack includes quite a few of the early songs that didn’t make it into the movie where they were still trying to work out what the style of music was going to be and who the characters are, so the music and story were definitely co-developed together.

Re: Pixar in a Box: the art of storytelling

#74

Post by mentos »

andygcook wrote: post #49

For anyone looking for a deeper dive into how Pixar iterates on their movies and how highly-functioning creative teams can work in general, Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull is a really interesting book. It goes into the history of Pixar and some of the detail of how they work with actual stories from the movies they've made. One of my favorite anecdotes from the book is how they nearly almost lost all the work they did…

Great book. I read it once 4 years ago and again 2 years ago thinking about reading it a third time. The lessons have been applicable to me in game dev but if you work in any field whatsoever that relies on creating anything I'd recommend reading it.

Re: Pixar in a Box: the art of storytelling

#75

Post by josephg »

whatshisface wrote: post #65
NortySpock wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds similar to the improv skit mantra of "Yes, and...", where any improvisation ("and then I found the cat on the shelf!") must be accepted and built on. (e.g. "Oh BooBoo, how did you get on the shelf you silly cat?") If an actor instead said "No, the cat wasn't on the shelf, the cat wasn't even in the room" the skit ends awkwardly.

"Yes, and next let's change everything."

“Yes and” doesn’t always mean literally saying yes. It’s about accepting the premise, not the proposal. The way it was taught to me, if you offer me a live hand grenade, I can accept the premise by saying “oh god he’s got a bomb!”, even though I’m saying no to the concrete offer to take your hand grenade.

“Let’s change everything” - depending on context - can be a no to the premise. It’s the same as the Pixar idea - improv is about making your scene partners look good by supporting their choices, and building on them in turn.

Re: Pixar in a Box: the art of storytelling

#76

Post by phorkyas82 »

clairity wrote: post #63
kinghtown wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that Pixar’s mastery of storytelling is overrated. Coco was lovely but I find their movies to be needlessly sad and curiously episodic in form. In “UP”, each sequence was very well crafted but they fit together randomly as though each scene was brainstormed by a group. They lack a singular vision in their films, there are no auteurs at Pixar: just art by committee. This isn’t to say that their stories are bad,…

> "I feel that Pixar’s mastery of storytelling is overrated." me too. the incredibles was pixar's high point of storytelling imho. of the first six films, i liked the toy stories the least. a bug's life , monsters, inc. , finding nemo to the incredibles was like a crescendo of animation, reaching a satisfying zenith of art. cars , which came next, was ok (but unoriginal for storytelling, the characters were mostly gr…

Maybe the whole mastery of storytelling is overrated per se. They were talking about how they build on their own experience, an epiphany - which is the essence of what they try to express. When I think of the great books and movies that I love I hardly remember the whole stories, but more a certain idea, scene or mood.

And thus doesn't that mean that the stories are merely vehicles, like mechanical means to transport.

Re: Pixar in a Box: the art of storytelling

#78

Post by wegs »

dragonwriter wrote: post #69
wegs wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frozen teaches kids all the wrong lessons. Shirk your responsibilities. Ignore your community. Focus on yourself. "Let it Go" is like an ode to everything I dislike about American culture. It's so very American. Best animated movie I've seen in the past decade was probably Moana, but I can't say I've seen many.

> Frozen teaches kids all the wrong lessons. Shirk your responsibilities. Ignore your community. Focus on yourself. Reading Frozen as teaching that is like reading Veerhoeven’s Starship Troopers (which, sure, is abysmal on all sorts of other grounds) as an endorsement of Fascism. Yea, those things occur in the movie, but the movie is quite specifically about it producing bad outcomes that must be dealt with by people…

You don't read Frozen. You watch Frozen.

You watch it in first grade through maybe through eighth grade, but probably at that point, you're too embarrassed to go to a little children's movie.

As much as I understand the more nuanced messages which could be taken out by a more sophisticated audience, much more so, I see the impact the movie has on actual real-world little kids.

I both read and watched Starship Troopers as an adult.

Re: Pixar in a Box: the art of storytelling

#79

Post by grawprog »

superbcarrot wrote: post #2

What people don't realise about Pixar is how much iteration goes into their stories - they're very comfortable with taking some idea and working on it from different angles until it's good. And there's a process there that can be taught. I think that's contrary to the way some people imagine storytelling - it's almost never the case that some creative person has a brilliant story come out perfect in the first draft.…

>it's almost never the case that some creative person has a brilliant story come out perfect in the first draft.

I've got a book i ended up getting in a free box of books. It's some fantasy novel.

It's probably the worst book i've ever seen in print. Everything from the description on the back to the font choices, sometimes four or five in different sizes on one page, to the actual writing reads like something a child would write.

Curious about how such a thing could exist, i looked into it more. Turns out it was a self published book edited by the author's wife.

Now this next part is speculation...

But you can almost picture his wife trying to edit this thing and the author just being like, nope we'll keep it my way.

Like, basic spelling and grammar mistakes, terribly worded sentences, a story that made absolutely no sense.

The thing is, getting past it all, there were some good ideas in there and likely, in the hands of a good editor and publisher, it could maybe have been turned into an alright, if still not that great of a book rather than, i'm not actually exaggerating here, literally the worst book i've ever seen.

Another example that just kind of popped into my head while writing this, the original drafts of star wars.

https://old.reddit.com/r/StarWarsCantina/comments/afvlzk/lin...

I've read some of them and honestly, they were pretty bad, like scyfy movie bad. Without the team of screenwriters and editors that worked through those drafts, we'd probably have no idea what 'Star Killers' was other than some weird cult scifi b-movie with a dedicated fan base of a few hundred people that get together once a year, get drunk, dress up as their favourite characters and complain about how nobody understands just how great George Lucas and Star Killers is.

And then Spaceballs would never have been made and that just woulda sucked a whole lot.

Re: Pixar in a Box: the art of storytelling

#80

Post by dragonwriter »

wegs wrote: post #78
dragonwriter wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Frozen teaches kids all the wrong lessons. Shirk your responsibilities. Ignore your community. Focus on yourself. Reading Frozen as teaching that is like reading Veerhoeven’s Starship Troopers (which, sure, is abysmal on all sorts of other grounds) as an endorsement of Fascism. Yea, those things occur in the movie, but the movie is quite specifically about it producing bad outcomes that must be dealt with by people…

You don't read Frozen. You watch Frozen. You watch it in first grade through maybe through eighth grade, but probably at that point, you're too embarrassed to go to a little children's movie. As much as I understand the more nuanced messages which could be taken out by a more sophisticated audience, much more so, I see the impact the movie has on actual real-world little kids. I both read and watched Starship Trooper…

> You don't read Frozen.

“read” as in “to understand and give a particular meaning to written information, a statement, a situation, etc.”

> You watch it in first grade through maybe through eighth grade, but probably at that point, you're too embarrassed to go to a little children's movie.

Well, I mean I was a lot older when I watched it, but when my then-four year old watched it his commentary indicated that he saw the problems stemming from the behavior problem it highlighted pretty well. Not sure my almost-three-year-old got it, but she hasn't shown any sign of inverting the message as badly as you have.

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