Getting the Story Right
I recently stumbled across a clip of a cartoon that was a childhood favorite of mine. It was a jarring moment, because as soon as I clicked play, the difference between my memory of the scene and the reality of the scene was exposed. The animation was — to put it lightly — absolutely terrible.
It’s an interesting moment, to see something that you thought you remembered so clearly in a different light. This is not an uncommon experience, and I have often heard people speak about their fear of going back to rewatch beloved childhood classics, only to find that they no longer live up to their expectations.
Though we are often quick to consider our first memories immature and invalid, I wonder if that’s the case. I’m starting to believe that the first memory we have is more important than the second.
This calls to mind a passage from Ed Catmull’s excellent ‘Creativity, Inc.’, where the Pixar head details the stressful process of creating their first animated short. Titled ‘The Adventures of Andre & Wally B.’ and produced back in 1984, the then small team had committed to premier the piece at a conference, only to realize there was simply not enough time to complete the project. As he says:
As the deadline approached, however, we realized that we weren’t going to make it. We’d worked so hard to create images that were better and clearer and, to make things really hard, we’d set the movie in a forest (whose foliage tested the limits of our animation chops at the time). But we hadn’t accounted for how much computer power those images would require to render and how long that process would take. We could complete a rough version of the film in time, but portions of it would be unfinished, appearing as wire frame images — mock-ups, made from grid polygons, of the finished characters — instead of fully colored images.
This is, without a doubt, a worst-case scenario. Yet the reality of the situation revealed a strange truth:
The night of our premiere, we watched, mortified, as these segments appeared on the screen, but something surprising happened. Despite our worries, the majority of the people I talked to after the screening said that they hadn’t even noticed that the movie had switched from full color to black and white wireframes! They were so caught up in the emotion of the story that they hadn’t noticed its flaws.
This was my first encounter with a phenomenon I would notice again and again, throughout my career: For all the care you put into artistry, visual polish frequently doesn’t matter if you are getting the story right.
Our minds are able to fill in the gaps of a visual story when the narrative is important to us. We are already so accustomed to doing this, crafting entire worlds while reading books or listening to talks — why should we think it’s any different with a medium like film?
Nothing is more important than story.
