A considerable part of the creative energy at Pixer goes into story development. Jobs understands that a film works only if its story can move the hearts and minds of families around the world. His goal is to develop Pixar into an animated movie studio that is known for the quality of its storytelling above everything else."We want to create some great stories and characters that endure with each generation,"Jobs recently stated.
For story development, Pixar relies heavily on 43-year-old John Lasseter,who goes by the title of vice president of the creative. Known for his Hawaiian shirts and irrepressible playfulness,Lasseter has been the key to the appeal of all of pixar's films. Lasseter gets very passionate about developing great stories and then harnessing computers to tell those stories. Most of pixar's employees believe that it is this passion that has enabled the studio to ensure that each of its films has been a commercial hit. In fact, Lasseter is being regarded as the Walt Disney of the 21st century.
When it's time to start a project, Lasseter isolates a group of eight or so writers and directs them to forget about the constraints of technology. While many studios try to rush from script to production, Lasseter takes up to two years just to develop the story. Once the script has been developed, artists create storyboards and copy them onto videotapes called reels. Even computer-animated films must begin with pencil sketches that are viewed on tape. "You can't really shortchange the story development, "Lasseter has emphasized.
Only after the basic story is set does Lasseter begin to think about what he'll need from pixar's technologists. Lasseter, for example, demanded that the crowds of ants in A Bug's Life not be a single mass of look-alike faces. To solve the problem, computer expert William T. Reeves developed software that randomly applied physical and emotional characteristics to each ant. In another instance, writers brought a model of a butterfly named Gypsy to researchers, asking them to write code so that when she rubs her antennas,viewers can see the hairs press down and pip back up.
At any stage during the procese, Lasseter may go back to potential problems that he might see with the story. In A Bug's Life, for example, the story was totally revamped after more than a year of work had been completed. Originally, it was about a troupe of circus bugs run by P.T. Flea that tries to rescue a colony of ants from marauding grasshoppers. but because of a flaw in the story---why would the circus bugs risk their lives to save stranger ants? --- codirector Andrew Stanton recast the story to be about Flik, the heroic ant who recruits Flea's troupe to fight the grasshoppers. "You have to rework it," explained Lasseter. "It is not rare for a scene to be rewritten as much as 30 times.