Great companies need to balance art with economics. Tension isn’t necessarily a bad thing if it leads to a great product in the middle.

The need to control and know everything as a manager can stifle innovation. Having great people you trust is a far more scalable method.

Playing it safe doesn’t lead to long-term, consistent success; staying in the middle — the “unstable” place where new ideas are formed and art, economics, time, and technology are all being balanced — does.

Catmull paraphrased by mashable. Thanks to Heribert!

Visual effects houses can be the best, most fun and high-tech sweatshops on earth.

Lee Stranahan writes to James Cameron in a bid to raise public awareness of this issue that will – unfortunately – be nothing new to anyone working in the industry. I have to praise Lee for leveraging his own considerable reputation for this cause. Not convinced this is an issue? Listen to another industry giant Scott Ross.

The artist perspective is rosy. The producer / company outlook is very bleak.

Well – that’s a catchy soundbyte to motivate you to head on over to fxguide and take in the whole thing because it exudes hard-earned knowledge about this tightly calculated business. Whether you’re a novice or expert: this is required reading.

To paraphrase: the business is eroding down to a mass of freelancers, while the films are increasingly being sold by wham-bam effects orgies that can only be delivered by the management capacities at the big five. Interesting observations and solid conclusions.

I say ‘small’ as I consider polish getting a system from 90 percent to 100 percent. But really, that last 10 percent takes just as long as the first 90. Polish is no small task; it is just about small unseen things.

Fine-polishing an animated sequence is an often underestimated expenditure, and so adversely affects many an ambitious project. Read the rest at Gamasutra. There’s also an interesting mention of the dangers of meandering, another issue I often badger my students about.