Making a short -part 2- The idea

First of all, I just want to thank everyone for the great comments. They are very kind and encouraging, just the fuel you need to keep at this thing. Heard from a bunch of old friends, "Hi back, everyone is doing great."

this is an early concept I had in '96 using a totally different character.


Okay, let's talk about ideas. Where do you get them? What do you do with them? An idea for a short should be just that an idea for a short. I mean you are not going to make War and Peace in a short. Though that could be funny to boil it down to 3 to 6 minutes. Chuck and the boys squeezed the 100 hour Ring Cycle into 6 minutes. But I guess that's my point, they knew they had 6 minutes. They started from what they knew. You see staring onto the blank white paper and trying to think about an idea is madness. It's a void of infinite possibilities. You need limitations. Orson Welles said, "The enemy of art is the absence of limitations." Now making an animated film in your spare time provides you with a great limitation. Time. So don't make a film, that's 6 (or 8) minutes long in full animation, unless you want to spend a decade making it. Just a word of experience. I wouldn't do it again. You want to take a hard look at how much time you can realistically spend on your unknown film. Then think of how you can make it - hand drawn, stop motion, cut-out, computer and your ability to do it. Then forget all that and think about what you really love, what you would like to see in a film. You have to pull the idea out of something you love to think about, makes you laugh, really gets your brain a firing because you are going to spend a lot of time on your own doing this thing. This idea, of Leonardo, came about because I have always loved the idea of somebody putting on a pair of homemade wings and trying to fly. It is idiotic but full of perseverance. It makes me laugh. I mean look at this guy-



At first I tried to develop the idea with a character I had from another idea (see top) but it was too open ended. This led to Leonardo da Vinci (as thinking about flying with a pair of homemade wings will). This gave me a character, setting, etc. I knew it would be an extra pain to record and animate dialogue so I'll just put it to music. The music dictated length. Then I began to draw in this large sketch book. I would draw anything I could think of about da Vinci and then I began devouring books. Research is everything in generating and then formulating ideas into something truthful and concrete. We at Pixar do it extensively and it shows in the films. The idea then started telling me what it wanted to be.

this is, I think, the first doodles I did with the idea using Leonardo. Totally unreadable but I never thought I'd put them out here for the world to see.