The Oval Portrait – Production Notebook

This time from the mouth of Pixar art director/production designer Ralph Eggleston in an interview on the Spline Doctors site.  Click here to download the full audio of the interview.

 Question: What are some of the common elements found in a really good short film?

“Brevity, Clarity, Sincerity… that’s it.”

“Be brief; get in, get out.  The second it’s done, get out.”

Thursday I had an incredible opportunity.  I got to pitch my OP storyboards to Pixar storyman Jim Capobianco!  Of course I was pretty nervous because I already had a big list of changes and fixes queued up, but not yet drawn, so I knew I was pitching a flawed piece.  But it was great to get his input on my project and hear him echo suggestions that have already been made, as well as new important ones.  Basically he ripped it apart, but fortunately he also explained that’s just how it goes in story.  You can’t get attached to your ideas, you have to learn to sacrifies your “babies,” so to speak.  And interestingly enough, he said, more often than not, the first big idea that really got you going about the project in the first place will, after a while, be the very thing hampering the piece because you’ve developed it so far that it doesn’t fit anymore, but you don’t want to let it go.  So the big things I got from listening to Jim are to enforce limitations on yourself when creating the initial story and to remain flexible throughout the development/refinement process.  And also that refinement only comes from reworking and reworking and constantly exposing what you have to criticism, so you can rework it again and again.

 Thanks Jim!