Category Archives: Philosophy

EllieAndFriendsClub YouTube Channel ♫ ♪ ♫ ♩ ♪

What a pure pleasure…spent down time this week listening to hundreds of uplifting songs about inspiring women to create the Intergalactic Ellie Fan Club channel!  : )  Whoowhooo! (Not official Pixar — Ellie on film charms everyone; her Intergalactic Fan Club frankly doesn’t pull any punches. When it comes to female foeticide, burkas, genital mutilation, and all male anything — brace yourself — Ellification of the universe is a forgone conclusion.
 
(Bless you precious muses!! Art is Powerful. Hope this little μούσα-who-could finds you inspired and smiling! Special thanks to Emma Coats, Pete Docter, Bob Peterson, Ronnie del Carmen, and the entiré Pixar story crew for bringing this beautiful archetype to us!)

The Importance of Play to Creativity

“In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget–but never shows up in a budget–is morale. If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.”
Andrew Stanton  http://blogs.bnet.com/businesstips/?p=1496
 

“Every time I’d have to show Up! to John Lasseter or Andrew Stanton, I would hate it because I just want to be left alone and make the movie. And yet when once I do show it to them, it made it so much better, especially hearing their comments. They’re great filmmakers themselves, and we have this great system at Pixar where we show each other our work about every four or five months and get feedback from all those guys. They’re such amazing filmmakers. To get comments from them is fantastic.” Peter Docter
 
” It’s very supportive, although it’s not always easy, because we’re all very honest with each other with constructive criticism. It’s like we’re all on the same team, and if the whole team wins, then a place like Pixar will not have to go away. We all get together every 4-6 months to look at each other’s films. It’s not some sort of tribunal or anything. It’s almost like a writers’ room kind of feel, where you get a chance for objectivity from others. If you work on something alone too long, it’s like staring at yourself in the mirror—you stare too long, and you start seeing a million things wrong, and you start changing things just because you can. So you need your peers—somebody you can trust creatively—who can say, “I think this is great, don’t change it,” or, “This is not working as much as you think so change it.” Andrew Stanton
 
“I also like a comment I’ve heard Andrew Stanton say, which is “talent isn’t fair.” I’m lucky enough to work at a company where I don’t have a chance of being the smartest person in the room, and I like it that way. I won’t lie; it’s hard to work with so many talented people, you have to have a certain diamond hard sense of self or you can come home bummed out after a hard day at work. But it does cause you to bring your A game. Luckily, we tend to do a very good job of hiring people that are actually nice, and really want to work with other people.” Michael B. Johnson
 
“We’re not supervised. We’re sort of allowed, like an independent filmmaker, to do what we want. You don’t get that freedom anywhere else. And this is the only studio outside of Disney, when Walt Disney ran it, where an artist runs the whole place. Here, it’s John Lasseter, and that trickles down.” Andrew Stanton
 
“My motto has always been, ‘Be wrong as fast as you can’. Which basically tells you that we know that the process involves messiness and risk-taking, but that’s what art is. Art is not doing the same thing twice, art is not playing it safe; art is taking risks….”
Andrew Stanton
 
“The one thing that I’m very proud of about Pixar, that I think does make a difference, is that it’s not some “Nirvana”, Willy Wonka chocolate-river-place where everybody walks around with great ideas and we just make them. It’s a bunch of hard-working guys that really know that, like, it’s all about getting on your bike and falling over as often as you can. What Pixar does really well is… make it a supportive atmosphere to make mistakes… In a weird way, the process is dependent on you making mistakes… That’s how we find a lot of freshness to things.” Andrew Stanton

Playful Narrative as an Educational Tool

“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” Plato

“In play our burdens feel lighter and we are opened to new possibilities. But play goes even deeper – it shapes our brains to make us smarter and more able to adapt to situations.
 
Our success as an innovative culture rests first, on our recognizing the importance of play, then on our allowing play into daily living. 



The National Institute for Play believes that as play is woven into the fabric of social practices, we will dramatically transform our personal health, our relationships, the education we provide our children and the capacity of our corporations to innovate. ” The National Institute for Play

 
Isn’t it strange there is an “Institute for Play”?!? : )))))
 
Stuart Brown on how humor, games, roughhousing, flirtation and fantasy are more than just fun. Plenty of play in childhood makes for happy, smart adults — and keeping it up can make us smarter at any age.
 
Ken Robinson on the topic: “Creativity is as important in education as literacy.”

…………………………………………….Sports are for Idiots…………………………………………….

“This is a young lady not watching a football game, not watching a basketball game — she is watching exploration live from thousands of miles away and it’s just dawning on her what she’s seen — when you get a jaw drop you can inform. You can put so much information into that mind it’s in full recept mode — this I hope will be a future engineer or a future scientist in the battle for Truth.” Quoted from this fascinating YouTube video on new technologies for deep-sea exploration (17:20): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHU8G6icwsY
 
Amen! Why do so many people spend their lives watching grown men with balls play together in stadiums subsidized by taxpayers? Why do we teach our children this waste of humanity is acceptable, much less worth accolades? (Let’s not even start discussing the single worst economic decision Americans make, repeatedly, throughout their lives — their choice in automobiles: pickup trucks, sports cars, and SUVs. New too, of course. How much education, travel, and peace-of-mind has been exchanged for vehicles, debt, and enterslavement?)
 
Ok this blog is often over-the-top rhetorically…sports are important for exercise and development of leadership, teamwork, and cooperation  2¢

Suggestions for Improving…or, "if you want to learn to draw — draw, draw, draw."

Interesting article:

“Every day you are slowly reinventing yourself into the person/artist you’re going to be in ten years. Keep this in mind.”

“Generally speaking, if you are young and male, trust your opinions about your work a little less, you aren’t as good as you think. If you are a woman of any age,  you’re usually a little better than you give yourself credit for. This isn’t an exact thing, but psychologically, this seems to be how it works.”

“As a last comment, I would stress how important drawing is. Painting is an extension of drawing. If you don’t draw well, you will not paint well. Master drawing and you can do anything you want with it. It is the most fundamental skill in all the visual arts and is an asset to every visual artist. “

SpaghettiOs: a collection of fun uplifting creations by loopy artists through the ages…

(Check out what is not on this little guy’s foot, but on
his head! –And this was created 1,500 years ago!)

This sculpture is the most important ever created by a human being (in my super humble opinion)…it is not violent, does not celebrate a state, nationality, or ruler, neither is it conspicuous ornate decoration nor even utilitarian…it is simply human, and fun, joyfully reveling in our loopiness. I LOVE this sculpture. It may be seen at the provincial museum in Kumming China. I LOVE IT!!!! Well, maybe not THE most important, but, one of the most important…allllthough, if forced to choooooose!! I love it!!)

Storyboard Panel for Commercial

This is from a storyboard started for a spec commercial the day my father returned to God. (After leaving the emergency room I went immediately to Home Depot to purchase security items for my newly-widowed-mother’s house…one of the most surreal experiences yet…as a friend said later that day, “It is a special time.”) Anyhow my Aunt graciously flew from California within hours, so, after spending two years caring for my bed-ridden father in suburban Florida, it was possible to reflect upon what I truly wanted to do, with Life.
Drawing was the only thing I could undertake that day, and, it has been the only activity I have loved consistently since nursery school, so…why not?
Sometimes I think we conceive of our true dreams, those we have held since childhood, as out of reach because we may think to realize them would be too fantastic to imagine, simply outrageous dreams. Life is too short for this manner of thinking. If trapped in such self-limitations the antidote may be to dream bigger by reframing our current “outrageous” dreams as commonplace expectations.
My outrageous dream is to become an American da Vinci/Shakespeare and enable other artists to supercede me…my commonplace everyday expectation is to feed and clothe myself, and hopefully an eventual family, by drawing. Nothing is humble about either goal — and nothing should be. Life is over too quic-
“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but those who are really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”
Mark Twain