In the BackTalk for the March issue of Church Production Magazine, I took a quick look at how I have applied the work principles I picked up while at Pixar to video ministry. It was a pretty quick summary, so I’m going to expand on some of the ideas here, starting with…
Anything worth doing is worth doing right.
Strolls down the Pixar Studio halls of project development found early work on films that never went beyond those walls. Sometimes those projects lead to modeling and animation work before being shut down. In fact, my first months after training were spent in what was then called “Pixar Interactive,” where several video games were in development before the entire department was reformed and the game projects abandoned. The decision was to put everyone's effort towards feature films and shorts in spite of the time and money already spend on these other projects.
But does a church ministry have such freedom? We need to be good stewards of the money donated by others to spend on creative projects. Someone who made sacrifices to contribute to a ministry should know that there money is going towards God's work and not unfinished productions. With this in mind, we need to be reasonably certain of a project's success before pouring resources into it.
But at the same time we should not be discouraged from exploring creative ideas that may not seem all that practical. I firmly believe that both God and an audience will respect and appreciate creativity that makes the best of available resources. So when a project is looking good on paper and is ready for a serious investment of time and/or money, visualize the end result and ask if it is truly a God-inspired goal. Will you have to cut corners and settle for lesser quality just to get it done? Or will instead the intended end result be of a level of excellence that honors God and inspires people? Exploring those questions honestly will help you proceed with a challenging project confidently.
Yeah, and do I hold to all these principles for every project I have ever done? No. Sometimes a project becomes what I end up calling "Operation Damage Control." There's an upcoming blog topic if there ever was one.
