I was thinking about coming up with a much more grandiose headline to lure in the readers, but I’ve found that just telling people that you’re going to visit Pixar elicits a reaction somewhere between awe and envy. Mostly a bit of both. But then Pixar is an incredible rarity: a studio that has never had a flop. In fact, many of their films achieve the rare distinction of being loved by kids and adults alike. It’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t love the “Toy Story” movies, “The Incredibles” and “Wall-E” to name just a few. If you hate them, it probably means you’re a bad person who enjoys torturing hamsters and burning books.

First, a confession: I’m a bona-fide Pixar geek. I own all their movies. I’ve read extensively about the studio (links at the end of this piece for the interested) and I almost went there nearly 5 years ago. That visit was cancelled at the last minute, and I’ve cursed the people responsible ever since (you know who you are). With this personal history, I started jumping up and down like a giddy schoolboy when the Creative Social program arrived in my email, and it became evident that I would finally get to go see the brainchild of John Lasseter, Ed Catmull and Steve Jobs.
After lunch at the optimistically-named Can’t Fail Café in sleepy Emeryville, we arrived at the studio.

Exiting the bus, we saw a Tesla in the parking lot, which was very cool for the electric car fans, and made our way to the main entrance of the campus. The campus is home to the about 1,300 people who work at Pixar.
Outside the main entrance sits a giant version of the lamp and the multi-colored ball from one of Pixar’s first ever short animated movie, “Luxo, Jr”. Cue a million cameras going off.

We then went into the main atrium of the Pixar building which contains all the shared facilities such as restrooms and cafeteria, ensuring that people from all departments constantly run into each other and start conversations – an idea that anyone doing agency layouts could learn a lot from. After a security briefing, where we were told not to take pictures of our visitors passes and post them to the web (bad, bad Fefa!) as people have apparently been trying to copy them to get access to the studio, our incredibly gracious host Paul Topolos and the director Ralph Eggleston (director of one of my favorite Pixar shorts, “For the Birds”) took us upstairs to begin our tour. We were told to ask before taking pictures of anything and not to freak out, if we had a celebrity spotting (except if we saw Sharon Stone, in which case we could do anything we wanted – surely a Pixar inside joke).

Paul Topolos and Ralph Eggleston (with the cap) welcomed us to Pixar.

Upstairs, we all gathered around a wall with some 60-80 mood drawings telling the entire story of Pixar’s recent film “Up”. After talking about how the mood drawings help everyone understand the flow and the tone of the story and talking a little bit about Pixar and “Up” in general, the floor was opened to questions. Since I didn’t record all the Q&A, I can’t relay all the back and forth, sadly. And then something truly remarkable happened. In the beginning, there were two people talking to us, but as they spotted other people passing, they called them over to become part of the conversation. After a while, we had directors, art directors, story directors, production artists and a sculptor spending their time answering our questions. Particularly amusing was story director Ronny del Carmen’s vague protest as he was pulled over to talk about how to craft a great story: “But…I was just on my way to the bathroom…” For those of you who have always wondered whether writers of emotional material are impacted by the act of writing it, I can now confirm that they are. Ronny said that when he was writing and sketching the almost wordless love story that opens “Up”, he was definitely choking up. While they were all aware that Pixar has had an unprecedented run of success, they were vague about why that is, but actually it wasn’t necessary to put it into words, as we all witnessed a work atmosphere that surely has a lot do with it.

The easy camaraderie that was on display as well as the obvious respect all the Pixar folks had for each other’s skills and quirks spoke volumes about a workplace, where everyone is focused on one thing and one thing only: creating the best possible films. Everyone spoke with passion about his particular contributions to the process and no one interrupted each other and there was no feeling of anyone outranking anyone else. Just a sense that they were all quite aware of their stupendous luck in working with something they love with people who share their joy at creating the best animated films in the world. Sure, they were not above taking potshots at other animation studios and film studios they had worked at in the past, but it was all very tongue-in-cheek and done with no malice.

Creative Social San Francisco president PJ Pereira fitting right in at Pixar.

After the Q & A, we were invited to take a closer look at the exhibition of “Up” artifacts lining the 2nd floor gallery. Surprisingly, a lot of the artists stayed around to have smaller one-on-one conversations, which we all appreciated immensely. I’m not going to attempt to describe all the beautiful character sculptures, drawings and models that were on display, but only say that each and every one of them showed incredible artistry, even if they were ‘just’ studies for the animators to draw.

After walking around for a bit and looking awestruck, I managed to corral Ralph Eggleston and chat to him a bit about various things before asking the one question that I’d promised my animator friend Matt that I’d definitely ask for him: How do you get a job at Pixar? Everyone here is a filmmaker, Ralph said. And the best way to be considered is to show that you are too. Now, that doesn’t mean you have to do a feature length film or even an animated film for that matter. A two-minute long film that shows that you understand storytelling and character development can be just as effective in showing off your skills. At Pixar they don’t look to fill pre-determined job positions, they’d have you come in and talk to them and ask what you’d love to do there? All of which goes back to John Lasseter’s famous quote: “If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life”. Never before have I considered leaving my job and trying to get a job at Pixar as much as in that moment. The take-away is obvious and worth thinking about, as we go about our daily jobs of running agencies.

Yours truly and a monster

As I got ready to go raid the gift shop, I couldn’t help but ask if Steve Jobs ever comes over and what he contributes these days (Jobs is the chairman of Pixar). I didn’t get much info about that other than that he’s definitely still actively involved, but I did get a funny anecdote. Apparently someone had recently called Jobs a ‘shithead’ in a passionate conversation, which had taken Jobs aback some. I got the feeling Jobs is not used to people questioning his judgment and certainly not to being described as a shithead to his face. But the heart of the story spoke to the passion that everyone at Pixar displayed.

As we were leaving, we found out that it was very rare for Pixar to have as large a group of visitors as Creative Social (there were about 40 of us), so once again thanks to the fabulous group of people at Pereira & O’Dell who arranged this for us.

On our way out, we saw a big group of people gather and applaud something. As I sat down in the bus and checked Twitter, I saw a tweet from Lee Unkrich saying that Pixar was celebrating finishing the layouts for “Toy Story 3”, which he is directing. So it was a big day not just for Creative Social, but for Pixar too.

Was it everything I dreamed of? You bet. And I’m pretty sure that as we were leaving, I saw a little green monster peek furtively around the corner to see, if the strangers from the outside had left yet.

Links:
A great Harvard Business Review article about how Pixar fosters creativity
A wonderful book about the history of the studio, “To Infinity and Beyond: The Story of Pixar Animation Studios” is available at Amazon

{Editor’s Note: You can read another Social’s view of the visit at Rubbishcorp]

Posted in: Creative Social, Inspiration |