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Book Review: Creativity, Inc.

I promised to ramble/write about "Creativity, Inc." a couple posts back, so I'll do that here.

"Creativity, Inc." is a book written by one of the cofounders of Pixar, Ed Catmull. Catmull dreamed of doing computer graphic animation -- the book chronicles how he made it reality. I enjoyed reading this book because it's really fascinating how the execs at Pixar love their company, so much to the point where they make their decisions for the benefit of their employees and because of how much they love their films.

Pixar faced a lot of challenges over the years since their beginnings as a hardware company. One might call those challenges "failures". Things like how they almost ran out of money. Or when they were almost sold to another company because they were short of money. Or the time when someone typed "rm -rf /" and lost 90% of "Toy Story 2" (one guy saw Woody slowly disappearing, then called the systems team and told them to pull the plug, literally). Each time Pixar was faced with adversity, people were genuinely afraid and expressed their sentiments. Yet, Catmull and the other founders worked hard to salvage these situations and learn from them.

Catmull talked about how his role led him more into management -- not because he really desired to be a manager, but because it was the right choice for his company. He also wrote about how Pixar managed their story writing and how they searched for the best minds to develop the stories. After watching/re-watching a number of Pixar movies in the last few months, I appreciate all that Pixar has put into their movies: how they build emotional connections with their viewers and the characters, the story and character development, the attention to detail... after reading the book, I felt like all those became way more obvious. It's really amazing that, with so many creatives (whether they are in tech, sculpting, writers, etc.) working together at Pixar, they've achieved unity in direction and production.

I've rambled enough. Now go read the book.

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