 But before I get to talking about cartoons, I need to talk about why I'm going to talk about it. There's, you know, the young and fresh-faced innocents will come up and they want to be in the industry and ask you like, how did you get to where you are? And inevitably, I personally always deeply disappoint them because I have no idea how I ended up here. It's just been a series of accidents and somehow this is where I am. Especially as it is now. Which, if you've seen my daughter who's a teenager over the corner there, can not imagine what she'd do. Good times for cartoons and animation. I'll get in the future and I'll get back to some stuff that I didn't. I learned from my interest in animation and continue to apply to that. And there's a lot of interesting stories that have become more and more relevant to me as a bottom-up person. And that is the animator Chuck Jones. Does anybody here know who he is? You know who he is. Or at least you know what he did, basically. So Chuck Jones was in the art studios in the 30s, 40s, and 60s. He's there for a long time. He also created, like I said, you've seen Chuck Jones work even if you don't know who he is. He also wrote a couple creativity instruction manuals. They're really, really well written. And I realized how much that really, like, steeped into. I'm going to tell you some of my interest from his books. And, you know, in the light of what I'm also, hopefully, in the light of what you can get out of them. So the first thing I pull, the lesson I pull out of this, is this idea of digging with it. So Chuck Jones, in the 1920s, I think, kind of going into the 30s, often too, as our school's first row in class, the professor said, he carries around with me for years. I love it. It's so useful. I use it for myself. I use it when I talk. It's anything, right? It's a great way to start an educational path by saying, look, you're going to screw up. And that's totally cool. In fact, not only is it cool, you have to do that to get to the next level. It's a really great way of saying you don't have to come in here at a certain level already. You don't have to be an expert in this. This is a journey you're going to have to take it. Just, I mean, basically deal with it. But in a really encouraging way. Well, this is one of the things that Chuck Jones always pointed to in terms of how he learned to work through the necessary parts that were sometimes kind of tedious, of creativity, and bringing a project to completion. And he has another story about that. So as hundreds, he grew up in Southern California, so he had this really amazing advantage that he didn't know at the time where he could go down the street and watch Charlie Chaplin make movies. And he said, one day, when he was a little boy, his father came home and like blew his mind by saying that he had been watching Charlie Chaplin film a certain scene, and he kept not getting it right. And this is the quote. I'm going to read a lot of quotes in here. I'm going to read them. I'm going to use his words whenever I can. So back and visit him later or feel free to do that. But I'm going to make sure I read them all too. So Chuck said, one evening I lost faith in both my father and Chaplin. But my father came home and told us that he had seen Charlie Chaplin shoot a 15-second scene 132 times. And I think he gives him a little bit more in the book when he talks about it. He was like running around the scene and he's like supposed to follow, but he wasn't following the way he wanted to follow, and so he did it again 130 more times, over and over and over again. And little Chuck is like, why not do it right in the first place? He can't even learn to do it while watching his own movies. But then he goes on to say, it was the beginning of my understanding of the two primary rules of all creativity. The first is that you must love what you are doing. The second is that you must be willing to do the often dull and tiring work necessary to bring each creative endeavor to completion. And in that endeavor, only the love should show. There's a little bit more in this passage too where he talks about you watch Chuck those movies, you don't see it 131 times that he fell, or that he didn't do it right. You see the time you got it right, but it's also, it's not chance. He got to that point where there was 131 other takes that he did. This is a little bit of an extension of the first lesson is that in recourses of the same point, it's really hard to make things and it's really hard to learn how to do things the way you want them to be done. And there's no way through it, or there's no way around it, and just going right through it and doing all of that work. And it's going to maybe suck in the meantime, but that's okay, because you'll get there. I'm going to have too much. So to kind of wrap up this particular point, this particular story, is going back to Chuck Shaw's experience when he was learning at school, at art school. And he said that he had, it might have been the same instructor that I quoted in the beginning. I'm not sure it might have been another one. But he talked about this instructor had two critiques. So if you were there in class, and you were drawing, this instructor came up behind you. There were two things he would say. What would it be? It looks like you're having some trouble, which would mean that, yeah, maybe things are going as well as they should be, or that you wanted to, so he would help you work through that. But he said that the other critique, not so much a critique as an observation, would be having fun. And he said having fun was the best thing that you could have get from this instructor. That meant he could see that you were enjoying the process of what you were doing. This always really struck with me, because while the other two things are talking about reaching a particular goal, or getting to a point, this makes the point in itself that it's not always about having a goal. That maybe the goal is that you're enjoying the process, and that's all the goal that you need to have. And maybe that's okay too. I think sometimes it's really easy to get locked into, I need to get to a certain point, or I need to get this little expertise. I need to have this completed. I need to do this. And forgetting, you know, maybe the process itself is valuable as well. Maybe that's enjoyable. Maybe you don't have a particular goal on what you're doing, but you're going to do it anyway. So those three things together are how I learned a lot about process in many things, whether it was in my career. It's definitely something that I've talked about when I've taught code related things. All of these things. The fact that you're going to have to do a lot of work to get where you want to go. When I was a coding instructor in my last job, one of our mantras was you are not your code, which means that, you know, this is a separate thing for you. So if somebody is critiquing that, it's a reflection on you as a person. And these things have that same message to you. This is a process that you need to go through. It's not about anything that you're doing wrong. It's about what we're going through. And then also, maybe we should be valuing that process as we're learning. Even if it's, you know, not perfect, it doesn't have to be. Maybe it's just about us enjoying what we're doing. Another thing that I really picked up from Chuck Chen was this idea of valuing individuality and character. Has anybody seen this cartoon? Can you see it? Okay. It's Mark Anthony and he's the big bulldog and he has a little kitty. If you have not seen this, I think there's a couple of them. The first one is called Feed the Kitty. You should go look it up. I think it's online in a couple places. It's a really beautiful little cartoon about the bulldog who's a big, ferocious bulldog. He comes across this little kitty. He starts barking ferociously and the kitten just kisses him on the nose and then climbs on his back and goes to sleep and it melts his heart completely. The problem is that the bulldog, his owner has told him that he's not allowed to bring anything else in the house or he's going to get in so much trouble so he can't let her know that he has this little kitten that he's not falling in love with. So he spends the whole cartoon hiding the kitten and of course hijacing Sue and all of that. It's really remarkable to me because this is a cartoon about too many characters or animals who never speak. This is not like any other cartoons where they speak English. They never speak at all. The only person who speaks is the dog's owner and that's only briefly. I've seen people cry at this cartoon and I've seen people I mean me too. Like it's so... I don't know, it really gets to something. But just the fact of that the fact that we can have a six-minute cartoon about characters that don't even speak and yet we can get so much out of it that we can connect with it on that level that in itself led into another really important lesson for me. In this passage, Chuck is talking specifically about animation and how you would draw characters. He says specifically we are not what we look like, we're not even what we sound like. We are how we move other words, our personalities. And our personalities are shaped by what we think, where we come from by what we have experienced and that personality is unique to each of us. So even though we may not be drawing characters or having to think about how you would animate a character, there's a lot in here that speaks to how we interact with people and connect with people and empathize with people because this is true. Everybody is really unique and they're bringing with them all these background information, all these experiences that you may not be aware of. And so if we can find ways to think about that when other people are bringing in and think about what we're bringing with ourselves when other people are seeing that, I think that this is really for lack of a better term, we talk about some of this stuff in relationship with diversity and inclusion in our industry which I think makes a lot of sense. It's all about learning empathy and it's about learning how to bring in these understanding of the other people's backgrounds and have communications based around it. I've always figured that if we can respond the way that we respond to a cartoon about a whole dog and his little kitten that never speak to us, we should be able to find ways to communicate with other people and finding these common grounds and understanding other people's backgrounds and getting something just as valuable out of that. And that if we've learned how to do that then we get to mine all of the rich experiences that unique individuals bring to what we're doing our workplaces and our communities and everything that we're making and we can learn to communicate effectively and find these common ground then we can and we just have so much more to work with even if we're not bulldogs or kittens which is the ideal but we can't always get there. So here's another idea of respecting your medium. This is a really straightforward and arts and this goes back to a story that Chuck Jones told again when he was a young boy when he was younger his father tried a lot of get rich quick schemes and most inevitably failed. There was always be like some new idea some big build up and then the business would fail. The thing is in part of the build up what his father would do by a whole bunch of new stationary with a new business letter head on it and a whole bunch of new pencils with a business name on it. So when the business failed all of the Jones kids got deep nest drawing materials and imaginable they got to use these great materials but the thing is their father wanted to make sure he got rid of the stuff so he could go into the next business so he would encourage the kids to use as much as they can and he also said they were actually forbidden to draw on both sides of the paper he says no, you're only allowed to draw on one side and he said what if you were literally a da Vinci and you painted the Mona Lisa on one side of the canvas and the last supper on the other and then Chuck goes on to say nevertheless and perhaps, just perhaps he knew what he was saying he brought into focus the most vital role of creativity you must if you ever pretend to artistry respect your medium be it a blank piece of paper or a canvas and a touch bar sheet an uncard piece of stone or an unexposed for your film or unexposed for your film so this was, when he was writing this this was still really early to directly to what we do in the tech industry today for me this always made a lot of sense though a lot of my speaking career I've spent talking about the connection between design and development and talking about, you know, what it's like to work, design for a medium that is dynamic and moving and what that means in terms of usability and things of that nature so this makes a lot of sense to me and then this is one of the passages that correlates most directly to my career on a daily basis but it's very easy to translate into pretty much anything you do you understand the rules of what you're working with and the more you can understand that whether or not you think that's your exact realm the more you can understand the whole the better you're going to be able to make something effective with this going back to my earlier example so if you were maybe a developer who thinks that you don't know anything about design or don't understand the whole process or don't need to but the more you understand about the whole and understand what you're working with the better products we can make and also vice versa when it comes to disciplines so the next lesson I pulled out is the idea of finding inspiration and constraints and more in Brother Studios in the 1940s in that era when they were making cartoons so here's the thing about those cartoons we know a lot of them today because they're on television they re-run a lot, right? we have no DVDs now but when they made them nobody expected them to ever be watched again beyond the one time they were shown in the theater and they were really produced with the sense of back to those days if you were a theater owner you would order a package from a movie studio you had a feature movie, you had a newsreel and you had a cartoon it all fit into a nice time slot and they just needed the cartoon to round everything out other than that nobody cared the one and only studios in those days were animation studios were just an amazing bit of we don't care about what we're producing we just need a product to fit in the slot Chuck Jones in his book sells a very colorful stories about how they produce things in those circumstances but those things that always suck out to me when I read these books is the interesting thing that these bits of film they were not allowed to edit at all, period, there was no editing and if you know anything about film that sounds ridiculous, and it is all of the cartoons had to be 6 minutes long and so they had to plan it out to the second before they made any of it because there was no time to edit, there was no money nobody cared, like the producers are like we need 6 minutes of this I don't care what's in it, produce me 6 minutes and so as a director Chuck Jones has to think of every single second of an animated cartoon all the frames have out of the music everything went together at a time and he said later is that none of them realized that there were any other way of doing it none of them realized that editing was a thing that existed they just knew that this is what they had to do but the thing is you watch those films now those cartoons and their timing is impeccable the storytelling is impeccable because it had to be so there's a really strong lesson in that for me is that they were able to distill everything down to what it absolutely had to be and this is something Chuck said I don't know specifically talking about this but I drew the inference but he said the whole essence of good drawing and a good thinking perhaps is to work a subject down to the simplest form possible and still have a believable for what it's meant to be a lot of times I think that our inclination is to fight against constraints we don't want to be constrained especially us we don't want to do things we don't want to do we've got freedom we have power we get to make things with a client or anything else puts constraints on us that makes us do things in a way that we would not reach for in the beginning that makes us just not like things at all and I'm the same way but that's why I try to keep this in mind because I think sometimes constraints can create some really interesting things because it will force you to think more carefully about what you're doing and why so it's not necessarily always a good thing to have constraints imposed on you but it doesn't necessarily always have to be a bad thing either I think it's worth going through that process and thinking about maybe this is an opportunity for us to really distill the essence of what we're doing down to what it has to be take away unnecessary things maybe find better ways of doing what we're making or trying to achieve than we would otherwise come across seeing the cartoons that these slides are from somebody's very excited about that that makes me happy we'll get back to the goal of having you see current students after this this lesson is really a culmination of all the others it's everything that I've pulled together in terms of why these things mean a lot to me and I start this section off with another story that Chuck told this one is a little bit different I'm going to have to draw it out a little bit more like I said it was animating 30s 40s this was also the time that Disney was doing a lot of really influential stuff in terms of their shorts they started doing feature animation the first studio to ever make a feature length everything was going on and Chuck Jones obviously saw that this was really impressive wow nobody's been doing this before so he sent a letter to Walt Disney about that and he was like this was really cool thank you and Walt Disney wrote a letter back to him and he was like wow he was really proud of that letter he carried around for years so he could show everybody he said in over the years he wrote Walt Disney and other four or five letters and every single time he wrote a letter to Walt Disney wrote him a letter back and I got to a point in the early 60s Chuck said that he was I ended up just being at a place that was across the street from the hospital where Walt was nobody really knew at the time it was really close to Walt's death and so Chuck went in to visit him getting introduced himself and he said thank you for answering every letter I ever sent to you and then he said Walt Disney said something really strange and he said it wasn't hard you're the only animator who ever wrote to me and Chuck chose this story obviously this is sad this is kind of like wow this guy who changed the whole industry and the whole business of animation was able to reply to all the letters that I wrote to him because no animator ever wrote to him to talk about this sort of thing it makes my mind for a lot of different reasons it reminds me to always be appreciative of when people reach out to me or that I should reach out to people that I admire and do that but it also makes me think of just what kind of connections we're forging in our community in general I feel like I know that in my new career and I see it sometimes in others it's really easy to get so heads down in what we're doing or this particular thing that we're learning whatever it is it's really easy to kind of bury in it and forget to look up and see what's going on with us sometimes we forget to talk to other people not you guys because you're here at the conference maybe I get stuck going to the same type of conferences or you see the same people and you forget to talk about new things or you're not reaching out to see something new or learn something new I see this as an example of forgetting what else is out there and what other input that we can bring into our lives and our work remember to talk to somebody about something new maybe somebody you've never talked to before maybe it's at work or it's not at work or it's in a community or somewhere else there's so many things out there and I think this also goes to when we're thinking about education in general all of these things here are things that I picked up years ago when I was a teenager I was trying to work towards and I never got there I'm not an animator today it's a little funny that back when I was wanting to be an animator the jobs that I'm doing now didn't exist and now that I'm here doing these jobs traditionally I'm not an animator it doesn't really exist anymore so it's kind of like different discipline I learned how to be open to new ideas how to be open to learning new things and being okay with the whole process of experimenting and creating things without knowing exactly where it was going to end up if I had never succeeded I mean I've learned all this stuff so it's the fact that I actually kind of failed in that and focused on something completely different than what I ended up doing then I'm coming around full circle and learning all this stuff and so in terms of just being open and making sure that you're reaching out to everything that you possibly can whether you think it's going to fit into your path and your goal right now or whether it seems relevant or not or whether you think that person is actually going to talk back to you or anything like that reach out anyway the rules are simple take your work and never yourself seriously pour out the love and whatever skill you have and it will come out if you have a job that's just a job that's okay too what is it that you want to try has anybody had like an old hobby that you don't do anymore and everyone's knowing you think about hey I should do that again or like that but I'm not good at that anymore so there's no point or something like that it doesn't matter do it anyway it's not about your skill or anything like that this can be anything in your life it can be relationships with people it can be your job if that's what you want it to be chances are there's something there that you feel passionately about and it's really great to remind yourself that that's all that really matters and just go try it just go try something new or try something that you that you used to do that you don't do anymore or that you would always want to do and you thought you couldn't do some things like that so I said earlier that my goal was to get you all to go watch cartoons is anybody want to go watch cartoons now? maybe? and we achieved that but really my goal was to want to make you all go do something new and I know that's a really big, vague, grandiose but that's what I wanted to do anyway because why not? what's stopping you? it doesn't matter if it fits into your plan because whatever your plan is anyway you're going to get something out of it no matter what and until the end if you want to do something sincerely it's going to work out and it all comes back around the way it should be and that's really all I have so you know, Godspeed I'm just going to make the books a check room these are the titles of them they're pretty easy to find these are the only two that I've written the first one is a little orchestrate biography the second one has a little bit more about technical drawing and I was talking from because it's a long story website if you'd like to check that out, feel free do we want to chat about some things? if anybody has anything we want to ask or chat about, I'd be happy to do that for a few minutes it's been so much stuff alright, thank you