The treasure trove in your deleted scenes

Creative fuel from meh ideas

My daughter has been working her way through Pixar’s 30-year oeuvre. When she deems a film a favorite, she not only watches it over and over again, she wants to understand it from every angle. Which is how we recently found ourselves in the “Extras” section of Inside Out, watching all the deleted scenes.

They’re super rudimentary—think black and white storyboards, with jumpy animation, basic voiceovers, and minimal scoring. To watch the scenes is to see fresh ideas in very early development.

Here’s an example. The below is an early concept for an opening scene in the movie:

I’m assuming most of you have seen Inside Out, so I feel confident in saying: This is so different, right? Granted, the scene is lacking lighting, color, and full animation, but there’s no question the story is far more convoluted than the final version. And so it goes with the other deleted scenes (many of which you can see here).

Honestly, I thought a lot of the concepts in these scenes were bad. Okay, maybe not bad, just awkward. Like, knowing how the film actually came to life, you can’t believe the storyline ever veered so wildly (and darkly! sinisterly!) from the one we know.

But isn’t that the way of anything we make? As weird as they felt, I LOVED seeing these scenes. Sure, I liked seeing how the sausage was made (process is a constant source of fascination for me), but more importantly, it was a great reminder about how making anything good is truly iterative. You put a bunch of ideas down on paper, toss them around, produce them partially, and see what’s working. Inevitably, the meh stuff will fall away until you’re left with the stuff worth keeping and building upon.

And it was a reminder about how even the greats—a studio like Pixar among them—aren’t god-like creatives who roll out of bed and write a beloved story in a matter of days, or even weeks, months, or years. Director Pete Docter mentioned that construction of the mind—a concept ultimately scrapped in the final version—was “a huge element through the first two, three years in making the film.”

I’m writing all this as an observation of creative process, but also as a reminder to myself. I am someone who puts an immense amount of pressure on the things I put out into the world, even more so in today's modern digital environment which is overstuffed with fluff and driven by an attention economy. And I am often hamstrung by the simple fact that “when you put something into the world, it’s no longer yours, really.”

But before we even get to that point, we have to start somewhere. We have to make the thing in its first iteration, good or bad. Or, as Steve Almond writes of first drafts in his latest, “The first one is for you. It’s your chance to shake down your unconscious, to see what comes loose and what sticks, to make changes, to duck down blind alleys, to get lost.”

I share this as I think it applies not just to artistic endeavors, but anytime we’re learning or trying something new. In this day and age, when most of us all have some kind of project or hobby or thing we’re working on, this is a little message that your deleted scenes (that is, the things that don’t make the cut, that we would often rather forget) are evidence of your growth.

Something else interesting:

I watched the deleted scenes before I saw a trailer for Inside Out 2, which coincidentally, arrives in theaters today (I didn’t plan it this way when I drafted this newsletter then left it sitting for a couple weeks, I just got lucky!). The minute I saw the trailer, I recognized elements from the deleted scenes in this new, polished movie. Ennui’s character has been resurrected, as has the idea of forcing emotions from headquarters, no longer needed or valuable. Jury’s out on whether these ideas will hold up in a different context, but the point is, what is discarded from one thing could be great for another project.

The writer and filmmaker Kirby Ferguson talked about this recently via a creative hack he calls ODDS. It’s something I’ve done in a different format, though I like the simplicity of his version better (and have since adopted it). As you write something, you move rejected/cut ideas to the end of the document under a heading called ODDS. They’re there if you decide to move them back, or they can be trashed, or saved elsewhere if you need them. So with anything you’re working on, as it makes sense, creating a place to stash your “deleted scenes” can leave you with future great ideas, or at the very least, a map that shows you how far your work has come.

Public domain image found here, with edits made by me