Pixar's Story Xperiential Class

The beauty of this online live course is that by the time the nine weeks have drawn to an end,  the process of building a story sneaks up on you and you can’t quite believe that you’ve developed a structurally sound outline which can serve as a springboard for a complete piece.

The class begins with a simple question: What if?   

It’s a question that, at its very root, invites creativity in and stimulates the imagination.  It’s the core of the Big Idea or the High Concept on which to build your narrative.  Since the faculty of this course are mostly Pixar alums and artists, they often use Pixar films as points of reference.   The What If? of Finding Nemo, for example, is What if a father lost his son and had to traverse the most dangerous part of the ocean to find him?

However, the instructors don’t expect you to start out with a question that’s quite so fully formed.  You being with brainstorming methods like creating lists and combining opposites.  Before you even get to themes or subtext, you are urged to have fun and play.  This is the phase of story building where your mantra should be: only the waste basket knows for sure.   Or, to paraphrase what Ben Affleck said to Matt Damon during the writing of Good Will Hunting, don’t judge yourself by your worst ideas, judge yourself by your best ones.  Now is the time to keep ideas flowing and, just like with a faucet, if you shut off the bad ideas, it bottlenecks your good ones too.

At the end of the first week, you are required to have three what if? questions and drawings to match.  Throughout each of the nine weeks of this course, you will be writing and drawing for every assignment.

What if every time a teenage girl felt intense emotion, she produced insects from her body?

What if a bullied boy opened up his broken umbrella in the schoolyard and was transported into an apocalyptic world where he was a superhero?

What if a girl’s parents turned into monsters and she was the only person in the family who could leave the house?

Each week builds upon the last as they take you through a series of exercises to flesh out the details of your character and your story.

Week two delves deeper into character where you are asked to consider: when faced with this conflict or situation, what would your character do?  What are their internal and external features, their obstacles, and their overarching wants and needs.   By the end of week 2, you have chosen one of your what if scenarios and created a character profile for your protagonist.

Week three focuses on world building.  You are instructed to draw one or more of your characters in a setting and create elements of design that convey your story ideas.  The goal is to start thinking like a camera and incorporate lights, darks, blocking, perspective, and shapes into the composition in a way that tells the story without words.

Week four gets you to think about theme and to brainstorm ideas for the moral of your story.  This arises from the needs of your main character that you delineated in week two.   By the end of week four, you also have all of your major story beats written out into a mini-outline that will become the basis for developing each of the acts more specifically in subsequent weeks.

One of the best aspects of this course is the templates the instructors provide for you to brainstorm and structure your story.  Somehow, this is the most organic and fun anyone has made outlining.  I’ve taken many writing courses from Second City to Save the Cat, but the simple step by step building block approach that the Pixar Experiential class took was hands down my favorite.  I didn’t really even realize I was outlining until it was over.  I’ve always gotten in my head about the midpoint, the break into three, and whether or not I’ve properly reached the Dark Night of the Soul or adequately Stormed the Castle.  I had no such experience here.

By the end of week four you have a concise overall outline and for each of the following three weeks (five through seven), you break each of the major beats down into three minor beats.  Deliverables (also known as homework) each week are roughly sketched images threaded together in story reels with voiceover and sound.  (This is, after all, a class about storytelling for film so you do need to know how to edit.  Simple software like iMovie works fine.)

A final class is dedicated to rewriting and understanding the difference between, as Michael Arndt eloquently calls, the bad, good, and insanely great endings.   In a nutshell, this comes down to: what’s at stake.  And in his great YouTube Tutorial, Michael Arndt boils it down to the fact that great endings always resolve the external, internal, AND philosophical stakes which each have their own inciting incident and arc within the greater narrative.

This class was enormously creatively stimulating, and for anyone who wants to build their storytelling skills, I highly recommend it.  Be forewarned, it’s also a ton of work.  One day, I spent from 11:00am to 11:00pm drawing frames to get the final piece finished on time.  However, I was so thoroughly immersed in the process, I completely lost track of time.  Immersive experiences have a high correlation with happiness, and this was definitely an absorbing and educational class.

Here is my final project:

Monsters in the House video from Story Xperiential class.

Talent vs. Skill

“Wow, you’re so lucky,” people say to me when they see my work.  “I wish I could draw.”

There is this pervasive mythology that artistic people are born with the ability to draw, paint, or sculpt because this otherworldly aptitude was somehow zapped into them at birth, and that out of that bolt of divinity, they became endowed with a skill set apart from the common man.   For the most part, this couldn’t be further from the truth.  While certainly some people are born with extraordinary gifts, the cultivation of any skill set required to bring any creative enterprise to bear takes work.  An enormous amount of work.

The real issue is that our society appreciates art but doesn’t actually respect it.  Our education system teaches generalized creativity instead of the skill set required to master the principles of visual design.  As a result, fewer people develop whatever artistic faculty they possess or discover if they even have talent at all.   I once had a teacher say to me when I wanted to learn some of the principles and techniques of realism, “Why would you want to do that?  Just throw your emotions onto the canvas.”   Even improvisation, however, requires structure.  Monet didn’t just dabble paint, he created pieces that still possessed an understanding of perspective, light, color, and form even as he tried to transcend the ordinary.

I’ve had teachers plop crayons, colored pencils, paints, scissors, paper, and all manner of art supplies in front of me and tell me to just “create something”.  While there is a place and a time for noodling around and experimentation, this only serves to reinforce the impression that art isn’t serious and that it’s only fun.  An attitude, I would argue, that makes our view of artists and our education system all the worse.  Can you imagine if we taught anything else that way?   What if you sent your children to kindergarten and the teacher said, “We’re not going to teach the alphabet.  Or grammar.  Or spelling.  We’re just going to let them feel their way to language through mimicry and interpretive grunting?”   Would you accept that?  Probably not.  But somehow, instead of equating the point, the line, the plane, the circle, the square, the triangle, the cube, the sphere, the cone, the cylinder, values, hues, gradation, composition, perspective and gesture with the alphabet, words, grammar, sentences, paragraphs, a thesis, and a conclusion, we short shrift teaching the actual language of visual arts for some woeful facsimile.

Art, like writing, like math, like knowing how to design and carry out a scientific experiment, like computer programming, is a skill set.  It’s not magic.   To those who think the arts are frivolous, there are ample examples in ever facet of our economy to refute that.  Art is all around us.  All those cereal boxes with a cartoon of Tony the Tiger on them?  An artist did that.   The iconic Nike swoosh?  The brainchild of graphic designer Carolyn Davidson.   The logo for the New York Yankees?  Created by famed decorative artist Louis Comfort Tiffany.  All the prints and patterns that blanket fabrics, paper products, textiles, ceramics, and gift products originated in the studio of an artist.  The entertainment and gaming industries provide one of America’s largest exports, art is involved in packaging, branding, advertising and marketing every single one of our consumer products, and, in a 2015 New Yorker exposé, journalist Ian Parker wrote that—far more than if the CEO, hardware engineers, or programmers—if Jony Ive, Apple’s top designer retired, it would have the most deleterious effect on Apple’s stock price, where “a ten-percent drop in Apple’s valuation represents seventy-one billion dollars.”  

From an economic standpoint, I’d say that's pretty serious.

And yet, because our culture devalues art education, the consequence is the devaluation of the process of creating art itself.  The danger of this myth of inborn ability is damaging for artists’ livelihood because people assume that the work is fun and easy.   Yes, some artists achieve celebrity status, and then they can sell a pill cabinet for five million dollars, but for most creative professionals, we regularly confront people who dismiss, or don’t see, the investment of time, tuition, supplies, more time, Adobe creative programs, classes and even more time it takes to maintain and develop visual language skills.  The biggest consequence of this is the atrocious Exposure Myth which every artist has experienced.  “I can’t afford to pay you, but this will give you exposure that could lead to more work.”  Spoiler alert: it never does.   And truly, the people who can actually give you exposure can also afford to pay you.

Thankfully, over the last few decades, artists have begun to articulate their frustration with this work-for-free paradigm and fight back.  Dan Cassaro’s sarcastic response to Showtime’s invitation for him to provide free work went viral; Mike Monteiro’s “F*ck You Pay Me” speech in 2011 felt like a beaconing call;  Taylor Swift, in her letter to Apple, who wanted to offer songs on their new service without paying musicians, wrote, “we don’t ask for your iPhones for free.”

Sometimes one image can take fifty to a hundred hours to create.   And sometimes, yes, it’s fun.  Even exhilarating.  But sometimes I can’t figure out how to make something work, and I have to teach myself a new method or how to use a new material or I have to go down the rabbit hole of experimentation.  And sometimes it’s a slog.  And sometimes my body hurts from being cramped into one position to render the image. And sometimes, I’m almost to the end, and I realize, no, I have to start over again, or undo part of what I’ve done.   And sometimes it just feels like work.

Which is why professional artists should not work for free.

Because to become a professional artist, you have to develop skill.  Art is a skillset, not a superpower–something people would understand if we had been taught to draw with the same rigor that we have been taught to read.

What does it take to be a professional artist?

It takes a long time and a lot of work.  There is no way around this.

Nick Saban, the coach of the Alabama Crimson tide, has won more NCAA National Championships in college football than anyone else in the current era.  He is famous for his meticulous focus on process instead of results.  He has said in interviews that most people say they want to be champions but don’t actually want to do what it takes to be a champion.  We like to think that we have a lot of choices, but if you want to be great, you don’t actually have the luxury of choice.  It takes what it takes.  

In this, he is correct.

Mastery takes many forms, but it always occurs in the following stages.   Most people start out unconsciously incompetent.  Meaning, we don’t know what we don’t know.   As we develop a sense of what we need to learn, we become conscious of our own incompetence.   This is followed by a long period of establishing a skillset until we become consciously competent.  And then an equally long period of day in and day out pencil mileage in order to become so good that we are unconsciously competent.

No one gets around this.   Yes, some people create something and become overnight sensations, but this is usually a fluke, and without a base level of competence, rarely leads to longevity.   Ira Glass, the creator of the podcast This American Life said it best in his now famous meditation on the process of creativity:

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

For art, there are three stages as you fight your way through this process.   The first stage is, can you draw a person?  Can you even make a drawing beyond a stick figure that even achieves an accurate representation of what a human being looks like?   This stage involves learning basic shapes, structural representation, proportion, and developing your line quality.   This requires an enormous amount of practice.  The second stage is: can you draw that specific person?   From here, you develop a sense of value, color, gesture, expression.   As you become more and more comfortable in your process, your own sense of an artistic style begins to emerge.  And then you achieve the last stage, which is, can you draw your version of that person?  When you think of the great artists—Vermeer, Picasso, Dali, Chuck Close, Rembrandt, Daumier, DaVinci—not only could they draw specific people, but it’s clear from looking at their work which one of them painted which piece because their canon of work has a singularity of vision.

Every artist needs to adhere to a practice, to develop a process, and to create projects on which they can hone their skillset and find their voice. The best way to get good at anything is to do it every day.   Drawing one day a week on the weekend for eight hours is actually less productive than drawing every day for twenty minutes.  Daily practice builds neurological connections which cement themselves every night during sleep.  Also, often starting is the hardest part (because it involves overcoming what Steven Pressfield has coined Resistance in his classic The War of Art), and once we are involved in a task, it’s easier to extend the time and energy and over time, because it has become a habit, it also becomes easier to start.

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld has said that he has an appointment with himself to write jokes every day, without a day off.  He has a Don’t-Break-the-Chain calendar of 365 days a year posted over his desk and draws an X after each session so that as he goes along, he doesn’t break the chain of X’s.  Author and 4-hour entrepreneur, Tim Ferris, who was struggling to write his tome, The Four Hour Body, received advice about writing from an author who had written over 60 books.  His advice, paraphrased here was:

“Make it small and temporary: the immense practicality of baby steps. Take the pressure off. Set a meager daily goal whether that be twenty minutes of drawing or two pages of writing or X amount of whatever practice you wish to cultivate per day. This way you avoid making a mental monster of your project. Setting the bar low will allow you to do what matters most: get started each morning. Take the pressure off and put in your five to seven easy sessions. The rest will take care of itself.”

Cultivating a daily practice will also eliminate creative block.  Because you’re no longer sitting down with the pressure of trying to create a masterpiece, but simply chipping away at exercises to make yourself better or explorations to make your project come together as a whole.   Cultivating a practice where you do the work for you, because it’s important, because it’s part of the fiber of your daily life, will help you find your voice and your style, and ultimately your audience because you’re human.  And human beings have more in common that we have differences.  So at some point, someone will look at your work and see themselves, even if you’re doing the work for yourself and from your own point of view.

To this end, to anyone who wants to become an artist, the best way is to go through the same kind of sequential, building block-style of training you did in school for reading, writing and arithmetic—whether it’s an atelier program, or a concept design academy, or a specifically designed program of online and in-person classes that cover the basics from draftsmanship to perspective to line, volume, value, and composition.  It’s a matter of trying different media, experimenting with different techniques, integrating different styles, learning different forms, and, as Bruce Lee would say, “adapt[ing] what is useful, reject[ing] what is useless, and add[ing] what is specifically your own.”   Becoming an artist is no different from becoming a lawyer or a doctor or an investor or a mathematician.

It’s not luck.  It’s a lifetime of hard work.

Sara Sedgwick Oil Painting Boot Camp (Kara Bullock Art Academy) Review

Sara Sedgwick’s Oil Painting Boot Camp is a four-part series of videos and instruction on alla prima oil painting with a primary focus on still life. Alla prima, an Italian phrase meaning “at the first,” is a wet-on-wet technique where paint is applied directly on wet paint without allowing previous layers to dry. Made popular by the Impressionists who painted outside and therefore had to move quickly to capture the light and shadows before they changed, alla prima involves quick, full strokes, and direct application of color. It is the antithesis of masters of realism like Vermeer who built up layers of tonal values and then applied a color wash at the end.

The full duration of the class, which is comprised of four sections—1. How to Mix a Palette (35 minutes), 2. Twisted Twenties (113 minutes), 3. Stroke Economy (58 minutes) and 4. Alla Prima Painting (about 2 hours)—is five hours and 37 minutes. Kara Bullock’s website is easy to use, the videos are professionally lit and well edited. You receive no feedback unless you join the Kara Bullock Art Community of Facebook. I would probably say I spent an equal amount or more outside of class doing the homework, and I found it well worth doing.

Sara espouses the “a painting a day” philosophy and the importance of focusing on one method or style of art or design and only doing that for awhile to master that process. I concur with her both from the standpoint that, just as a practice, doing something daily is far more powerful in terms of skill building and habit forming than doing it once a week or every so often, and because the only way to master something is to put in the time.

There were many things I loved about this class, and for those who want to not only learn the basics of alla prima but also who could benefit from overcoming the struggle with preciousness, I recommend it wholeheartedly. The stroke count and twisted twenties exercises both serve to loosen you up and plunge you back into painting if you’ve been away from it for awhile.

Stroke Count Exercise

Green Apple. Clockwise from upper left: 25 strokes, 20 strokes, 15 strokes, and 10 strokes each. Palette: cobalt blue, titanium white, cadmium yellow, Alizarin red..

I have to admit that when Sara said that fewer brush strokes would result in a better painting, I was skeptical, but in looking at my apple studies, I can see that the 10 stroke apple is far superior to the 15 stroke which is superior to the 20 stroke and so on because I was forced to make better and better strategic decisions with each round of more limited strokes. I was also forced to see the bigger value areas and not nitpick my way into distinguishing if there were slightly lighter areas within darker areas that clearly muddy the final image.

Twisted Twenties

Pomegranate.. Palette: cobalt blue, cadmium yellow, alizarin red, titanium white.

Twisted Twenties involves setting a timer for twenty minutes, rotating the still life around, and then painting it again. Although you could choose several things and arrange them for this, simpler is better because time is deliberately limited to push you to see and execute quickly. Since one of the pitfalls of alla prima painting is that overworking your picture can lead to muddied colors, this exercise gets you to be sparing, thoughtful, and immediate in your decision making and approach.

The brilliance of the Twisted Twenties and Stroke Count exercises is that both impose limitations which are necessary for great creative work. Indeed, more is not always better, and often the best work is born out of limiting some element whether it be time, stroke count, color choices, theme, style, etc. I also learned some art hacks like the fact that you can save your palette in the freezer to extend the life of your paint.

Final Exercise: Alla Prima Painting

Rock, Paper, Scissors.

Palette: Torrit Gray, Payne’s Gray, Lead White, Mars Black

The final exercise is to complete an alla prima painting. Sara introduces some solid questions about what makes a good still life and offers steps to take if you think the composition isn’t working. She also talks bout switching primary sets if you think different primaries are more appropriate for your still life, how to prevent color muddying, and how to diagnose problems as you go along.. In this lesson, she does instruct you to do a little bit of underpainting to block in the values before you get too involved with color. I chose to create a triptych for this, and found that all the limitations she imposed during the palette mixing and warm-up exercises honed my skills to realize my artistic vision.

My only criticism of the class is that too much of the class is spent watching the instructor mix paint. The entire first section is about how to mix your own palette and the aesthetic benefits of doing so. This is highly valuable and contains very salient tidbits. However, in the Twisted Twenties videos, she spends 21 of 42 minutes in the first video mixing her palette and 9 minutes in the second 30 minute video doing so again. At a certain point, watching someone mix paint is only slightly more entertaining than watching paint dry. Once I’ve seen it, I understand it. I don’t need to experience it over and over again. Especially in a course like this where I can watch the videos anytime I desire. That said, overall, I found the class educational, beneficial to my artistic development, and more important, fun.