why you should check out Pixar in a Box — The Art of Storytelling

Unless you have a Khan Academy account and are on it often (or you’re my mom—hello!), you’ve probably not heard of Pixar in a Box. And that’s just sad.

So, information and facts time.

Khan Academy (a free learning site) partnered with Pixar a while back to make Pixar in a Box — a series of courses centered mainly around animation. But, about a year ago, they came out with a course focused on storytelling.

In these lessons, story artists, writers, editors, and other people who work at Pixar teach and share insights on how to develop plots, worlds, and characters. Along with this, they teach the basics of film grammar and visual language and give tips on how to pitch story ideas and give feedback.

This information put together in one place is already wonderful, but considering it’s coming from Pixar (a studio that obviously knows how to tell a story because it’s made us care about the well-being of toys, fish, and robots), it rocks.

One of the things I love the most about this course is that you get to see the real people who work at Pixar. At the end of each lesson, they share advice, like how they got better at writing and drawing and what they’ve learned during different projects. It’s nice to know that not every idea worked out the way they thought it would. That even the professionals go through rough patches.

Basically, if storytelling is something that interests you, you should check this out.