Lux Luster

Luxo Jr was a touching short that I think I may have first seen on PBS once upon a time. But what made it stick in my head wasn't that it was animated lamps but that it was a kid (a kid lamp) playing with a ball and actually standing on one and bouncing. (Something I would attempt many times over the next several years and fail horrendously.) Had the story been the lady and the lamp, I wouldn't have been as impressed. As Greg Singer reminds us, the key to Pixar's great success isn't their technology, nor is it their story, but their methods of telling a story. A story is only as good as the one who tells it after all. Think of the best joke you ever heard and imagine someone telling it poorly. Point made. But I'll take it further, in Tools and Media Management we filmed a short film we came up with about a company that has to let some employees go and uses a series of jousts instead of a panel of reviewers. We all got the same footage, but there have been some rather interesting differences in the final versions produced by all the students. Perhaps none of us made the best possible version of the film, but then again "if it is worth doing, it is worth doing badly"