Inside Disney’s Animation Secrets: How Brandon Violette Crafts Stories That Come to Life
Ashley
How do you handle notes that you just really just vehemently disagree with, but they’re coming, you know, they’re coming from above. How do you handle those notes in a gracious way?
Brandon Violette
Yeah, you don’t respond immediately. You do you need to cool off. They say don’t look on notes on your phone because it always appears a lot longer of an email because it’s a smaller screen. So that’s a low that’s hard to do. But if you really, really have a problem with the notes, you do need some distance and by distance, I mean time. So, sleeping on it is a big one because you wake up the next day, you go, okay, it’s not so bad. It’s actually, if I do this, and I do that, then I think I’ll answer these notes and you do need a less emotional head about it. And I worked with an executive for a number of years, who said that her notes are the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one. And that’s the kind of attitude that you want from a collaborator, because you’re getting notes. And I really value those conversations are like – Hey, you said this, I’m thinking, what if we did it this way, and then you’re kind of spit-balling a little bit in the moment, and you go away with this new direction. And so if you need clarification, it’s worth the conversation. That’s very important, because it’s tough to just infer everything over email. Sometimes that happens, but that is part of the job. Just learning to deal with notes, you just have to deal with it. And so, the less emotional, the better.
