Question 3

Based on Kirkpatricks framework, how and what you will evaluate the effectiveness of the two-day sketching programme? Try to be as specific to Pixar as possible. (20 marks)

Pixar University: Thinking Outside The Mouse In most companies, it's extremely bad form to deck your boss. Not so at Pixar, where Technical Director Bill Polson clocked the president over the head many times shortly after he was hired. His weapon: long, thin red balloon. His audience: 12 classmates, ranging from janitors to animators to executives. His motivation: the teachers told him to. Polson was taking an improve class at Pixar University, located within Pixar's Emeryville headquarters. Here's how the sketch worked, he said, his voice warming as he remembered performing the skit. Status was ranked: one, two, three and four. The guy who was number one was in charge. We were prisoners in a cell, and we were trying to steal the keys from a sleeping guard. We had to badger number four to do all the work. If a balloon broke, we all had to hit him. Pixar President Edwin Catmull was number four. This kind of unconventional thinking is helping Pixar in its quest to achieve ambitious goals it has laid out for the next few years. The studio will increase production from one film every year and a half to one a year. It'll have the opportunity to renegotiate its co-production contract with Disney or choose another studio such as Sony or Warner Bros. to aid it in distributing its films. And it'll need to fight to stay ahead of competitors such as DreamWorks, which is fast developing digital capabilities and technologies of its own. The challenge falls directly to Pixar's 700 employees: Make more films. Make them even faster. Make them even better. To that end, Pixar University a professional-development program that puts as much emphasis on employee education as it does on company training is the company's secret weapon. During 90 percent of your workday, you're in this box you get to do only certain things, said Polson. And yet we're all here because we love movies and art. At Pixar University, all the boxes get removed. All the walls come down, and you get to be the director of your own creative idea. Polson has taken classes in drawing, screenwriting, and color, and he's completed a course in which he made his own short film. Not long after the improve class, Polson met Catmull again, this time to present a work-related proposal. I'm sitting here with the founder of our industry, and I'm trying to pitch my idea, he said. If I hadn't had the chance to whack him with a balloon, I don't think I would have functioned. The point of improve like most of classes in the packed curriculum is to push Pixar employees to try new things, work together better and test new ideas. If you don't create an atmosphere in which risk can be easily taken, in which weird ideas can be floated, then it's likely you're going to be producing work that will look derivative in the marketplace, said Pixar University Dean Randy Nelson. Those kind of irrational what-ifs eventually lead to something that makes you go, Wow, I never would have thought about it. JK Page 2 of 3 Profits from Pixar films have trumped Disney's traditionally animated films in recent years. Monsters, Inc." made $252 million in domestic box office receipts, compared to Treasure Planet, which totaled only $38 million. A year earlier, Pixar's "Toy Story 2" earned $246 million, and its predecessor brought in $192 million. Although innovative technology is responsible in part, analysts credit the films' success to their original stories. What makes a movie successful is not only the technology but the story that brings people in to see it over and over, said Merrill Lynch analyst Andrew Slabin. It's got to be edgy, heartfelt, warm. That's what the Pixar movies do. The culture of the firm teaches you to be better at doing that stuff, and [I imagine] the university is central to that culture." Pixar University expands the notion of employee education by broadening its focus from skills training to a more general fine-arts education. Employees choose from a full palate of classes - about 14 per week which they are allowed to miss work to attend. We have something going on almost every day and most evenings, said Nelson. We offer the equivalent of a B.A. in fine arts through our courses." Nelson said the university's primary purpose is to build morale, spirit and communication among employees. If you could create good filmmakers who would work here for 25 years, their first five years of film would be really good; their next five years would be amazing. By the time these people worked together for 25 years, you would just not believe the things that would happen. Like most Pixar employees, Bill Polson said he loves his job. He plans to hit 25 years, as does Nelson, who said, This is like having a foot fetish and running a shoe store for me to be an educator and to work around people who are passionate about education and who are this bright. Bright enough, according to Polson, to clock your boss atop his head with a balloon