About a month ago I came across an interview with Brad Bird, about what a company can do to infuse innovation and creativity into their work. Bird was hired by Steve Jobs to basically shake things up at Pixar, when Pixar was at its peak, simply because Jobs didn’t want to lose the growing momentum of the animation business. Brad is not only a creative genius, with Academy Award winning feature 3D animated movies, he is a true visionary and is not afraid to challenge standards if it means higher quality of productivity from his team.
His lessons can be applied to everyday life and virtually any company could use his ideas to improve their work product.
http://gigaom.com/2008/04/17/pixars-brad-bird-on-fostering-innovation/
I’ve been watching a ton of Pixar stuff lately, Monsters Inc., Cars, A Bug’s Life and there’s been a documentary on about the history of the company that’s really cool. The bonus features on the movies have storyboard concepts that didn’t make it, and show the process which is super cool. It’s amazing how many people work on each movie, the credits are huge!
I highly recommend Pixar short films as well if you like their stuff. They have several available for viewing on their website but recently released a DVD compilation of all of them. It’s quite amazing to see the progression from their first ever animated movie Luxo (http://www.pixar.com/shorts/ljr/) to Wall-E trailers.
There is also a very short section on the website entitled “How We Do It”. One of the pictures has a guy standing in a room full of individual story board sketches pinned to the walls. I find it fascinating.