Bruno Costa

SCRIPT - BUSINESS CASE: WALTER ELIAS DISNEY The business industry as we know it is one big race. A fierce competition full of success, failure, satisfaction, and disappointments. A typical career involves a lot of ups and downs, but just when you think you've hit rock bottom, life takes another turn to surprise you. Such is the case of a man who experienced so many defeats, we can be sure that at some point he felt it would all come crashing down. This is the story of a boy who left school at 16, and ended up founding an entertainment empire, and laying the foundations of modern animation. This is Walter Elias Disney, better known as Walt Disney. Hello, and welcome to our YouTube channel. Today you’ll learn about the man who changed the way we enjoy entertainment, and who created the largest media company in the world. Don’t forget to subscribe to our channel and hit the bell to get notifications about our latest videos. Now, let’s dive into the story of this prominent man. TITLE OVER BLACK: THE EARLY YEARS (No audio/text only) Walt Disney was born in Chicago in 1901, and he was the son of Elias Disney, a farmer of Irish descent who came from Canada, and Flora Call, a high school teacher. Walt was the fourth of five children. Walt's adventure into the world of animation began when he was only 5 years old, as he had a passion for drawing from a very young age. At the age of 7 he began to sell his first sketches to people from his neighborhood. In 1909 his father became ill and was forced to sell the farm, so he took his family and moved to Kansas City to work on deliveries at the Kansas City Star newspaper, where he took his two sons Roy and Walt to work with him. While Walt worked at different jobs he enrolled at McKinley High School and divided his attention and time between drawing and photography to contribute to the school newspaper, and later enrolled at some night courses of the Art Institute of Chicago. But his childhood wasn't a quiet one, or even all about drawing. At 16 he tried to join the army and was rejected for being underage. Later, he tried to do the same to join the Red Cross, only this time he lied about his age. So in 1918 Walter is sent to France in the middle of World War I where he works driving an ambulance and transporting officers. The funny thing is that even during this period Walt continued to do what he loved: drawings! His ambulance was covered with illustrations and cartoons! After the war Walt returned to Kansas City in 1919 and began working for Pesmen-Rubin Commercial Art Studio where he drew illustrations for advertising, theater programs, and catalogs. Here he meets another illustrator with whom he develops a close friendship, Ub Iwerks. TITLE OVER BLACK: THE BEGINNING OF THE ENTREPRENEURSHIP (No audio/text only) In 1920, the studio's revenues began to decline, so Walt and Iwerks are laid off, leaving them unemployed. That same year Walt and Iwerks started their own business called Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists. Unable to attract enough clients, the two agree to temporarily separate and Walt goes to work at the Kansas City Film Ad Company. A month later, Iwerks fails to run the business by himself and leaves too, only to join Walt later at the same workplace. This company used the cut-out animation technique, where Walt became interested in animation. The cutout animation was a form of stop-motion animation using flat characters, props and backgrounds cut from materials such as paper, card, stiff fabric or photographs. The props would be cut out and used as puppets for stop motion. With the help of a borrowed book on animation and a camera he got himself, he began to experiment at home. At a certain point he discovered that cell animation was more promising than the cut-out technique. This type of animation is what we know as traditional animation, and it’s a technique in which each frame is drawn by hand. This was the dominant form of animation in cinema until the arrival of computer animation. Unable to convince his boss to switch to the cell animation method, Disney decided to open a new business with his co-worker Fred Harman while keeping his day job. They land the Newman Theatre as their main client and set up the Newman Laugh-OGrams Studio to create their own animations. As the studio became more successful, Walt hired more animators, including Fredman Harman's brother and his old partner Iwerks. However, this venture did not produce enough profit to keep the company afloat, so Disney created Alice's Wonderland based on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, combining animation with live action. As a result, he produced a short 12-and-a-half minute reel, which however was completed too late to save Laugh-O-Grams studio and they went bankrupt in 1923. Walt had to move to California with a few drawing materials and $40 in his pocket, and met with his brother Roy who could contribute $250, so they could start doing something together. At the time, a New York producer named Margaret Winkell was losing the copyrights to Out of the Inkwell and Felix the Cat, so she needed a new series. This is when she hires Walt to produce a series of Alice, with an option to produce six episodes per season. That’s how Walt and Roy decided to create the Disney Brothers Studio. In 1924 Walt hired his old pal Iwerks and convinced him to leave Kansas City and come to work with him in California. And in 1926 Walt established the first office at 2725 Hyperion Avenue. In 1926 Margaret Winkler transferred her production role to her husband and producer Charles Mintz, who will have a strained relationship with Walt. The series is broadcast until 1927, when Walt takes the opportunity to end the production combined with live action. At this stage he’s gotten tired of it and wants to devote himself to animation. Mintz asked for new material to be distributed by Universal Pictures, so Walt and Iwerks created a series called "Oswald the lucky Rabbit". In 1928, Walt had a major disagreement with Mintz. First, Walt intended to negotiate terms to increase his pay for the production of Oswald, but Mintz instead wanted to reduce his pay. But that would be the least of his concern: Walt discovers that Universal Pictures owns the intellectual property rights to his series. Mintz threatened Walt to start his own studio if Walt didn't agree to the terms he proposed, but Walt refused. As a result, Mintz took almost the entire team with him, and Walt lost all his animators, except for Iwerks who decided to stay with him. TITLE OVER BLACK: THE BIRTH OF AN ICON (No audio/text only) 1928 becomes a key year not only in the history of Walt Disney, it also becomes a key year in the birth of one of the greatest icons of animation today. To replace Oswald, Walt and Iwerks decided to create Mickey Mouse. Walt's original name for everyone's favorite mouse was "Mortimer Mouse". It was his wife Lillian who thought it was too pretentious, so she suggested calling him Mickey. Iwerks revised Disney's initial sketches to make the character easier to animate. Walt, who had already begun to move away from the animation process, voiced Mickey until 1947. In other words, and according to one Disney employee, Iwerks was primarily responsible for the finished design of Mickey Mouse, while Walt Disney provided the soul. Moreover, the implementation of his voice and sound in the animation was key to the success and recognition of this new cartoon. And this is because our precious Mickey did not get much attention in the beginning. The first short film in which Mickey Mouse appeared was "Plane Crazy" in 1928, and then he appeared again in "The Gallopin' Gaucho", both short films without sound. These were shown in a theatre, and seen by a Metro-Goldwin Mayer producer, who was unable to find a distributor for them. Earlier in 1927, the first feature-length sound film "The Jazz Singer" had been released and been a huge success. So Disney used synchronized sound for his third short film called "Steamboat Willie", the first Disney cartoon to have sound. Once the animation was completed, Disney signed a contract with a former Universal Pictures executive, Pat Powers, to use his "Powers Cinephone" recording system to distribute Disney's first sound cartoons, which soon gained popularity. To improve the quality of the music, Walt hired composer Carl Starling, and thanks to his great contribution to the work that Disney was doing, it was possible to create the series of animated shorts "Silly Simphonies". The first animation in this series was "The Skeleton Dance" drawn and animated entirely by Iwerks. It was in this series that Pluto first appeared in 1930, Goofy in 1932, and Donald Duck in 1934. Both Mickey and the Silly Simphonies series were very successful, but Walt and his brother Roy felt that Pat Powers was not paying them a fair share of the profits. In 1930 Disney tried to cut costs by asking Iwerks to abandon the practice of animating every cel in favor of a more efficient technique in which he would only draw key poses and let the other lower-paid employees draw the intermediate poses. A major downturn in Disney's work routine would later occur. After Powers refused to give him the raise Walt requested, he also offered Iwerks to join him. This way, Ub Iwerks, Walt's longtime friend, left his side, creating his own company, the Iwerks Studio. And to further dampen the mood, composer Carl Starling quit soon after, believing that the studio would not succeed without Iwerks's presence. At this point a period of darkness descended on Walt Disney's life, as in October 1931 he suffers a nervous breakdown and is forced to temporarily leave work to go on a distant holiday with his wife Lillian. Later, to solve the absence of a distributor by not counting on Powers anymore, Disney signed a contract with Columbia Pictures to continue distributing the adventures of Mickey and his friends. Disney continued to use new technologies, and decided to incorporate the Technicolor three-strip technique to film Flowers and Trees in 1932. In fact, he manages to negotiate an agreement to acquire the exclusive rights to use this technique for 3 more years. All Silly Simphonies to be produced from now on would be in color. That year Flowers and Trees would win the Oscar for best animated short film. In 1933 Disney produced The Three Little Pigs, an 8-minute animated short that would also win an Oscar, and would be considered one of the most successful animated shorts of all time. The release of this production would not only be a success for Walt Disney, but would also allow him to increase his staff to 200 employees by the end of 1933. The release of this short film made Disney understand the importance of telling stories contained within the animation, since a message or moral reached the audience better. So he created a new department with artists who would be exclusively dedicated to think stories with a better storytelling level: These were the storyboard artists. TITLE OVER BLACK: THE BIRTH OF A NEW ERA (No audio/text only) In 1934 Disney had begun to get bored of making the same formula for short films and believed that releasing an animated feature film would be much more profitable. Therefore, the studio began a 3-year production to create the first animated feature film, the one we all know so well: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. When the news broke that Disney was starting to make an animated feature film, many believed it would be a failure and that it was nothing more than a whim and folly of Walt Disney himself. But that didn't stop Disney. Because Disney wanted this film to be as realistic as possible, he managed to bring several animals to the studio and hired artists to study realistic movement. He also sent several animators to study a course at the Chouinard Art Institute. To capture the changing perspective of the backgrounds as the camera moved around the scene, Disney animators invented the multi-plane camera, which allowed drawings on glass to be placed at different distances from the camera, creating an illusion of depth. The glass could move to create the impression of a camera moving through the scene. The first finished short film to use this animation technique was The Old Mill, a short film in the Silly Simphonies series, which would win an Oscar for Best Animated Short Film. To apply all the advances made with the new technology, Disney ordered some scenes from Snow White to be redrawn. TITLE OVER BLACK: THE BIG PREMIERE (No audio/text only) Snow White is finally released in December of 1937 and receives a huge wave of praise from critics and audiences alike. The film turns out to be a resounding success. It cost $1.5 million to make and grossed $6.5 million as of May 1939. Disney would go on to win another Oscar and a special statuette. The release of Snow White would mark a before and after in the history of animation, and would have special significance as it will belong to the golden age of American animation. At the end of 1938, production began on Pinocchio and Fantasia, both of which were released in 1940. However, they did not enjoy the same success at the box office because revenues in Europe fell drastically due to World War II. The studio lost a lot of money, and by February 1941 they were heavily in debt. In response to this financial crisis, Disney and his brother Roy put the company up for public sale and were forced to make significant wage cuts. Relations between Disney and its employees became strained, and employees decided to go on strike in 1941, which lasted five weeks. The Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs offered Disney to mediate the problem and proposed that Disney go on a voluntary visit to South America while they resolve the conflict, although Disney suspected that this would not end well for the studio. As a result of the strike and the company's crisis, many animators left the studio and relations between Disney and the rest of the employees who remained were permanently damaged. This strike also temporarily halts the production of Dumbo, to be released in 1941, which Disney produced simply and cheaply. Despite all the ups and downs, the film received a lot of praise from audiences and critics alike. TITLE OVER BLACK: THE HARD YEARS (No audio/text only) Shortly after the release of Dumbo, United States enters World War II and Disney begins producing military-themed short films. The revenues from these films would only generate enough income to cover some of the company's expenses and to finance Bambi, which had been in production since 1937. Bambi also failed to gross much money on its 1942 release and maked a loss of $200,000 at the box office. In addition to the losses caused by Pinocchio and Fantasia, the company had already accumulated $4 million in debt to Bank of America. At a meeting of the bank's executives, the company's chairman, who was aware of the loans made to Disney over the financial risk, told his executives that he believed they should be patient with Disney and give him time to market his products, as he had been watching his films for some time and believed that his films would continue to be good for years to come. In the late 1940s Disney reduced its production of short films. Roy also proposed to his brother to make more films combining animation and real image to reduce production costs. In 1948 a series of nature documentaries called True-life Adventures is born, Seal Island being the first of them. In the first half of the 1950s Disney began to pay less attention to the animation department, delegating almost all its operations to trusted animators, although he was still present at story meetings. Instead, it began to focus his attention on live-action films such as Treasure Island and The King's Archers. Animated films in the first half of the 1950s were Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan. From now on, Disney would begin to turn its attention to other business ventures. TITLE OVER BLACK: THE THEME PARK (No audio/text only) Disney had been thinking for years about building an amusement park. He had once visited Griffith Park in Los Angeles with his daughters, and when he saw it, he thought it would be an ideal place for it, as well as another site he saw in Burbank for which he was even given planning permission to build. But neither place had enough space for a park, so he would need a larger site. He finally found a bigger place in Anaheim, California, just 35 miles from the Disney studio. So Disney founded WED Enterprises, today's Walt Disney Imagineering, and used his own money to pay a group of designers and animators to work on the plans so as not to be criticized by shareholders. After obtaining the necessary financing, he invited new shareholders: American Broadcasting-Paramount Theatres-part of the American Broadcasting Company (ABC)-and Western Printing and Lithographing Company. In mid-1954, Disney sendt his "Imagineers" to visit all the amusement parks in the United States to analyze their strengths and weaknesses, or the problems of their locations, and incorporate the findings into their design. Construction began in July 1954 and the park was finally opened in 1955. The opening ceremony is broadcast on ABC television and watched by 70 million viewers. An editorial in The New York Times found that Disney had "tastefully combined some of the pleasures of yesterday with the fantasy and dreams of tomorrow". Although there were some minor problems during the park's opening, it turns out to be a tremendous success, because within a month of opening Disneyland was receiving 20,000 visitors a day and by the end of its first year, 3.6 million people had seen it. TITLE OVER BLACK: THE YEARS TO COME (No audio/text only) For the rest of the second half of the 1950s Disney continued to oversee other animated features such as Lady and the Tramp, which was the first Cinemascope animated film, released in the same year as the opening of the park, then in 1959 Sleeping Beauty is released, the first Technidrama animated film with 70-millimeter film. Later in the 1960s came 101 Dalmatians in 1961, The Sword in the Stone in 1963, and another film combining live-action and animation, Mary Poppins in 1964, which was the most successful feature film of the 1960s, although the author of the book on which the film was based was deeply disappointed with the outcome of the adaptation. The last animated film in which Walt Disney would be involved with its production was The Jungle Book, which he would not see its premiere due to his death from lung cancer in 1966. The Jungle Book was released in 1967. Walter Elias Disney is probably one of the most up-and-down entrepreneurs that ever existed, and one who had to deal with disappointment and defeat more times than any one person could tolerate. As a film producer, Disney holds the record for the most Oscars with twenty-two Oscars and fifty-nine nominations. He has also won two special Golden Globe Awards and an Emmy Award, among many other accolades. Several of his films are included in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. Thank you for watching our YouTube channel. Let us know in the comment section what was the part that most impacted you about Disney’s life! If you liked this video don’t forget to give us a thumb up and subscribe to our channel for more successful business cases!