Advice from 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.