Do you ever read a story and think, “I’d like to know that person!”
That’s how I felt when I learned about Jessica Heidt. Jessica is a script supervisor at Pixar (so she’s worked on a lot of the movies I now watch with my kids!).
When I learned Jessica’s story, I was immediately taken with the creative approach she used to communicate - and solve - a problem.
Her story reminds us how being courageous, creative, and collaborative can help us solve problems.
Enjoy!
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In 2014, Jessica Heidt noticed a problem.
As a script supervisor at Pixar, Jessica manages the studio’s scripts through all stages of production. While others focus on the animation or the camera work, Jessica focuses on the words. She sees every version of the script, knows when characters are added or cut, and how the story changes.
And when she was working on Cars 3, she noticed that most of the film’s words were being spoken by male characters. Not only that, most of the characters in the film were male.
And this situation wasn’t unique to Cars 3.
Less than one-third of characters in animated films were female. Although women make up 51 percent of the population, that wasn’t being reflected on screen.
Jessica saw a problem – and one that she was uniquely able to address, due to the nature of her role.
She began creating spreadsheets capturing the gender balance, and shared her findings with her colleagues at Pixar – the director, the writers, and anyone she thought had power to make a change.
“I wanted to be as unemotional as possible,” she said, “and just present the data and the facts.”
She thought her colleagues would be concerned, too, if they knew the scope of the problem. While many of them understood gender balance was a problem, her data helped them see precisely how big the problem was.
Armed with Jessica’s data, the filmmakers were able to see the gender representation at each milestone of production – and change lines and characters as needed to adjust the balance.
Jessica then worked with another colleague to integrate a new tool into their software that tracked the gender representation and lines spoken in each script. Pixar execs came to expect reports of gender representation in their films – and thanks to Jessica, it became integrated into their process of making movies.
Jessica’s work led to a change on Cars 3 and at Pixar. The gender representation is now much more balanced in their films, and their 2020 film Soul had a 50/50 balance between male and female characters.
If you’re facing a problem that seems too big to solve, Jessica suggests to step back and think about what tools you have that others don’t.
“This has been a problem acknowledged in our industry, but nobody has been able to figure out what to do about it,” Jessica said. “I showed people something they knew they wanted to do – they just didn't know how to look at the problem.”
By using her creativity, Jessica was able to communicate – and solve – a problem.
*Disney+ has a short on ‘Inside Pixar’ that features Jessica
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