Up!
I’ve just finished a workshop at the Banff Centre with Rich McKain from Pixar. He did a great presentation on his work and the very interesting life he’s had in the world of computer animation so far. All that hard work paid off by finally getting a position as an animator with Pixar and working on the film Up!.
I know I’ve been talking about New Media, film, narrative, video games and all sorts of other things on this blog so I wondered what New Media means to a company like Pixar. There have been a lot of different campaigns out there for film, some of them were less than notable while there have been a few successes, James Cameron’s New Media campaign for Avatar comes to mind. I talked a bit about it with Rich as he is working on the new Cars 2 animated feature that is still at least a year away. Their strategy for keeping up interest in the franchise and building interest in the new film? Animated shorts. Pixar knows that shorts don’t make any money and that doing a series of animated shorts is going to cost quite a bit of money. To put things into perspective, Rich kicks out a staggering 3 and a half seconds of animation per week so these shorts are a serious investment. It has to do with the fact that Pixar cares more about a meaningful story than building the kind of New Media hype that might get a couple of extra butts in seats when the film comes out. I thought that they might just be following an old model of creating content rather than strategizing through the many different social media and New Media options that are available for their films. I know that Pixar has an excellent grasp of storytelling but were they ignoring some current trends?
I started to do some digging into the film Up! to see what had happened for that film. I read this Huffington Post blog on the film, “Pixar’s new movie panned by wall street“. It turned out that Wall Street thought that Pixar was not only ignoring current trends but traditional trends in blockbuster films. They thought the film was a bad idea and de-valued Disney’s stock after hearing about the film’s plot. They didn’t believe it was commercial enough and the movie-going demographic was never going to want to see a film about a 78-year old man. The movie was just missing too many required elements to be a blockbuster. The prevailing philosophy from those who are motivated simply by profit was that the film was going to miss the mark.
The film went on to resonate deeply with moviegoers. It made $293 million at the box office in North America and $430 million in foreign box office sales. This isn’t even including the DVD, toys and other spin-offs that would have been part of the returns on this film. It has also gotten Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Animated Feature, Best Original Score and Best Sound Editing. It has met a number of successful standards for commercial and artistic success.
Pixar 1, Greed 0
So what does this mean for New Media? Well, I’m starting to believe that filmmakers that are driven by Wall Street are going to make films that follow the right formula. They hopefully make a return for their investors and a mindless escape for us, the viewer. New Media campaigns aimed at promoting those kinds of films aren’t likely to engage us, after all, we’re not there to have a meaningful experience, we’re there to escape. Viewers who are attracted to that kind of film don’t want to be engaged in some kind of detailed, immersive experience, the last thing they want is more mental overhead in their already busy lives. A company like Pixar might have a different kind of audience, ones that are actually attracted to stories that might help give some perspective on their own lives. I find it interesting that given that kind of audience, Pixar doesn’t try to build interactive New Media campaigns to go with their films. Instead they just create more narratives, short films in the case of Cars 2. Perhaps they’re just doing what they do best, perhaps they don’t think New Media can really handle narrative effectively. What I really believe is that they know storytelling and the needs of the audience. When New Media is able to provide those kinds of storytelling experiences, Pixar might consider it an option. When, and if, Pixar does try something, I suspect they will have thought it through rather carefully, much more carefully than anyone in Wall street apparently.
