Ratatouille and software development: Make it live!
I was looking at the excellent Ratatouille (Pixar’s upcoming movie) video podcasts recently and a thought struck me:
Pixar always makes their product live looong before the product is finished. The amount of video material that doesn’t even make it in the DVD extras, let alone the movie itself, is astounding. For example, on one of the podcasts, Pixar’s own cook explains how he cooked up a bunch of dishes to allow the artists to draw tasty looking food. Then somewhere in that segment, a fragment of a little video with the main character (Remy the Rat) commenting on the how yummy each animated item looks, with no background and a couple of rendering artifacts flashes by.
That scene was written, voice-acted, animated, and partly rendered JUST to get a feel for the characters, the tone of the movie, and to make sure everyone in the entire company has an real relationship to the work they are doing.
For those of you in IT - there’s a lesson to be learned here: Make your software does SOMETHING as fast as possible. It doesn’t matter if half the material is patchwork mockup. Once it’s a real application you can actually start or go to and see it in action, even if most of the results are just simple scripting - in other words, once it starts to ‘live’, you have a marketing message, motivation, a sudden sense of priorities, and most of all an unqualifiable feeling about the thing you’re making.
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