Describe your experience of watching Disney portrayal of the seven dwarfs. You can focus on your experience of what Disney expected you to think, feel, or do. Or you can focus on your experience of viewing the film’s portrayal of the dwarfs against the grain.
Describe your experience of watching Disney’s portrayal of the seven dwarfs. You can focus on your experience of what Disney expected you to think, feel, or do. Or you can focus on your experience of viewing the film’s portrayal of the dwarfs against the grain. You can also focus on both if you wish. Explain what was most surprising to you about the Disney film and why.
In the early 1930s, Walt Disney had become dissatisfied with producing formulaic short cartoon series. His enthusiasm was waning. He was bored and unhappy. He was restless. He felt that he needed a new adventure. He was relentlessly moving around to find a new concept… Then suddenly, the idea came like a lightning flash — Making a full-length animated feature film(which was never been tried before). He loved the idea. After deliberate exploration, he chose the story of ‘Snow White and Seven Dwarfs’.
Walt’s brother Roy was worried that making a full length animated feature film would require a massive amount of money and might be a disaster for the studio, resulting in bankruptcy. The bankers were also hesitant to lend the money. They requested Walt to drop the plan but he was not ready to quit.
Everyone’s worry was about the potential failure of the movie and how it would affect Disney Studio’s brand value and its finances. But Walt’s worry was how to translate his idea into the big screen that would captivate the audience in a way that no cartoon has done ever before.
Do not focus on the rewards, focus on the work.
Walt embarked on finding ways to captivate the audience. He began to ask questions to himself — What kind of movie experience would enthrall the viewers? Why would they want to see our movie? What kind of feeling should a customer get from the movie?.
Majority of decisions in a project has to be primarily in support of who would be using the product or service.
Walt was beginning to think from his customer’s perspective. The first step in providing a wonderful customer experience — Think, Behave and feel like your customer.
Steve jobs “I have always found is that you have to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. So we started with: what incredible benefits can we give to the customer? Where can we take the customer?”
Walt pondered, why would a customer sit for 90 long minutes cartoon? Gags? Bright colours? Would those colours not hurt their eyes?
The cartoons, Walt made until that time was of 10–15 minutes duration. In the shorter cartoons, Gag was the main component and its sole purpose was to make people laugh. Walt believed that people might get tired of gags if it was stretched for 90 minutes and the ‘quality of gags’ also would suffer. Just targeting only one emotion would not work. He had a hunch that he might have to target more than one emotion. He then asked himself another important question — Can you make people cry? Can you make people cry over a drawing? Walt reframed his problem and it gave him a completely new perspective.
If Walt could make people laugh, cry and feel sad…that means he was not selling a story or movie to his audience but selling an experience. Experience is connected to emotion