After Toy Story fulfilled Ed Catmull’s twenty-year dream, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box), he turned his attention to creating a place that could do it repeatedly:
The “Three Pitches Rule” required directors to pitch not one but three film ideas, so that they wouldn’t get stuck on one and fixate too early. Pixar directors were then allowed to spend years with a tiny team in the development phase of a film, probing ideas, trying out script drafts, and creating and re-creating storyboards while they hunted for and simplified the core of a story.
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The costs only explode once a film moves into production, at which point experimenting and learning become slow and expensive.
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Once in production, Catmull and his colleagues used the schedule to enforce regular feedback and learning. There were “dailies” every single morning, in which animators shared incomplete work with colleagues; “Braintrust” meetings, in which a small group watched a version of a film and highlighted aspects that weren’t working, without mandating solutions (Steve Jobs was barred, lest his powerful persona carry undue weight); and, after a film was done, postmortems, the main benefit of which was the pre-postmortem—the fact that the looming postmortem forced team members to collect and reflect on their lessons. Boundaries
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In his memoir, Creativity, Inc., Catmull recounts how the director of The Incredibles became obsessed with getting the fish in an aquarium in the background of a scene to flicker like flames, so animators worked on the inconsequential detail for months. Meanwhile, major characters still needed work. Eventually, a producer and department manager created a system in which popsicle sticks — each one representing the amount of work a single animator could complete in a week — were Velcroed to a wall and arranged next to characters that needed to be animated. If the director wanted to keep obsessing over the fish, he’d have to start taking sticks away from some other character and moving them to the fish. As it turned out, crafting visible constraints did the trick.