Feat of Clay

These days, if you want to win at business -- any business -- you need original, compelling answers to two connected questions: How do you come up with creative ideas? And, once you come up with those ideas, how do you implement them? Increasingly, work and competition exist along the boundary where ideas meet execution -- and where soaring creativity meets tough-minded business logic. If you want an animated lesson in how to combine those elemental forces, then visit Will Vinton Studios, in Portland, Oregon. It's a company that blends colorful, raucous, freewheeling artistic creativity with focused, rigorous, dirty-fingernailed business discipline. Run by Will Vinton, 52, and Tom Turpin, 40, Will Vinton Studios serves as a model (some might call it a "clay" model) for all companies that are struggling to define the principles that are necessary to sustain a high level of creativity, to run cost-efficient projects -- and to make a lot of money in the process.

It's a mixture that Vinton has been wrestling with for more than 25 years -- ever since his "Claymation" technique (which uses clay, rather than illustrations, to create animated film) garnered him an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1975. The Oscar earned Vinton immediate attention, along with a rush of offers to create television commercials and other projects using Claymation. But, despite the huge amount of work that he was getting, Vinton knew too little about the business of animation. "I was an artist, and the only people I hired were fellow artists," he remembers.

In the 1980s, Vinton and his team produced some of the most memorable advertising spots on television -- ads for Domino's Pizza, Kraft Foods, Levi Strauss, Nickelodeon, and, perhaps most notably, California raisins. By the time Will Vinton Studios hit the 20-year mark, in 1995, it certainly looked like a business: It had more than 100 employees and a roster of blue-chip clients. But Vinton knew that the company had been focusing too much on art and too little on commerce. "For a long time, the only thing that we cared about was whether it would be fun to do the work," Vinton says. "Whenever we took on a project, we failed to ask whether that project would make us enough money to build the infrastructure necessary to do longer projects in the future."

Then, in 1997, Vinton brought in Turpin (a Harvard MBA and a former Goldman Sachs banker) to build business practices that would support the company's artistic goals. Soon enough, the blend of art and business began to pay off: Will Vinton Studios is now producing a second season of "The PJs," a weekly "Foamation" comedy on Fox that stars Eddie Murphy as the voice of a housing-project superintendent. (Foamation is an animation technique that's similar to Claymation -- but it uses foam instead of clay.) And sometime this year, a second Will Vinton Studios-produced comedy, "Gary & Mike," will premiere on the same network. The creative burst has been matched by commercial success. Over the past three years, the company has chalked up an enviable financial record: Revenues have grown at a compound annual rate of 50%, and the company is starting to see profits (in previous years, it usually had just broken even) . And, over the past two years, the number of employees has tripled, bringing the total to 400.

How have Vinton and Turpin joined hands to knead together art and commerce, creativity and discipline? By implementing effective project management, by learning to manage artists -- and by managing to have an edge.

It's All about the Projects

"Toy Story." "The Lion King." "The Simpsons." By the mid-1990s, animation was the hot way to make movies and television shows. But Will Vinton Studios was mostly making commercials. "We didn't have the efficiency required to make larger projects," says Vinton. "In terms of talent, we genuinely felt that we were the best company in the world. But we didn't have the management chops to produce high-quality work on a low-enough budget." The only way to get a shot at the bigger jobs that the company wanted, Vinton realized, was to bring discipline to the way that it went about handling projects.

The pivotal challenge came in 1997, when Hollywood producer Ron Howard called to pitch an idea for a Foamation series that Eddie Murphy had dreamed up: a humorous look at life in an urban housing project. Vinton and Turpin flew down to Los Angeles for a meeting, and eventually they agreed to produce a pilot for the show, which was titled "The PJs" . Fox picked up the series, and suddenly the company had to figure out how to produce an innovative series on a tight budget -- not an easy task, given that the economics of Foamation are unlike the economics of any other kind of animation.