Video 5: Advice for storytellers

- Remember, the goal of
this lesson is to get you

thinking of yourself as a storyteller.

As you'll discover, telling
stories can be challenging,

so let's get a bit of advice

and encouragement from our artists.

- My high school art teacher
pointed out the drawings

of Michelangelo to me, and
she pointed out specifically

that you see all these
marks that he's left here,

these were the errors,
these were the things

where he was searching for the right mark

and then he found the right
line to draw the hand,

but he didn't have to erase them,

that was part of the search.

And it's okay, it's actually
part of the process.

And so that's when, in fact, she was like,

"Get rid of your erasers,
in fact, use your eraser

"to draw, not to get rid of something

"because if you're
messing up, then at least

"you're sure that you're
actually making progress

"to something that can be
better than where you started."

- It's okay that your idea isn't perfect

right out of the gate and
it's just about identifying,

is there something there emotionally

that is drawing you to it and if there is,

then there's something
there and you can just keep

working on it and changing
it, but always remembering

what was that initial feeling
that drew you to that idea.

- Ideas really, usually, when
you first come up with them,

they're kind of more like notions.

That's kinda in the what
if, what if hmm hmm hmm hmm?

And then the way you get
to a solid actionable idea

is that you just keep working on it

and every time you do a version of it,

every time you do a pass on
it, you get closer to the idea.

- It's a lot of hard work
and it takes trial and error

to get that story right,
because one thing that may

affect you and you have an
idea, is not necessarily

going to speak to somebody
else and that's where

figuring out the best way to
get them out of their head

and intellectualizing what's
being told them to feeling it

and getting in touch with
their emotions so that they're

invested in what's
happening to the character.

- The good news is that if you love it,

if you like telling stories,
if you like communicating,

if you like drawing pictures,
you won't wanna stop,

that's the great part,
and even if it feels like

you're not making progress,
you'll see a stack of drawings

or you'll see a bunch of pieces of paper

that have your words on them and I mean,

that's really impressive
because you're making progress,

so you gotta keep practicing,
it's as simple as that,

there's no easy way, and
in fact it's really fun

if you really enjoy it.

- Hopefully now you have a sense

of a few what ifs you want to explore

and some worlds and
characters to go with them.

And in the next lesson, we'll
dig deeper into developing

characters and how we
approach that at Pixar.