Acquired
01:18:48 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[01:18:48] S0: It does deepen your fandom. [01:18:50] S1: Yes. Exactly. Exactly. So all of this, as Walt starts to understand the business model power of what they've created, leads him right to the natural conclusion that Disney should basically always invest as much time and money as possible in the creation of new core IP. And Walt is starting to get a crazy idea of how he might be able to do that, which is to create Hollywood's first full length animated feature film, Snow White. [01:19:31] S0: Yeah. And, David, you put it in such a capitalist way there that it's it's to maximize the amount of of dollars that you sink into making the quality so that it federates onto this flywheel. I'm sure there was an element of that. There also is an artist with Walt where he's been creating these cartoons. He's starting to, like, really identify with the artistic community, with the fine artists of the time, build a lot of those relationships. And he wants to create something that is sort of seen as not only a technology breakthrough, but like an art breakthrough. Can can he create a masterpiece in this new medium? And can he play with your emotions? I mean, we we know that cartoon characters in a slapstick way can make you laugh, but there is this, like, total open question in the world of can you create animation so realistic and characters so compelling that you can make audiences cry? [01:20:32] S1: Yeah. [01:20:32] S0: That's the other side of the ludicrously capitalist big investment into Snow White.
01:20:32 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[01:20:32] S0: That's the other side of the ludicrously capitalist big investment into Snow White. [01:20:37] S1: You're totally right. I'm looking at it through, like, a business model capitalist lens, and, I I don't think Walt was thinking about it that way specifically. [01:20:47] S0: He did wanna build the most successful company that he possibly could that could take bigger and bigger swings. Yes. So, listeners, before we tell you the story of Snow White and how it came to be, now is a great time to tell you about one of our favorite companies, Vercel. So building software in the agentic AI era demands a completely different kind of infrastructure. So that's exactly what Vercel has been building. Their tools in their agent stack have been huge for companies like Notion, Brex, and Neon for shipping agents to production. And they just made some really big announcements on stage at their annual conference called Ship, which, David and I actually spoke at last year. Yes. One of the biggest announcements is Eve, Vercel's open source agent framework. [01:21:34] S1: Yep. Eve is the glue that ties their agent stack together. Building an enterprise grade agent used to take weeks. With Eve, it now just takes minutes. Think of it as, like, the Next. Js for agents. Opinionated, open source, and it runs everywhere.
01:21:34 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[01:21:34] S1: Yep. Eve is the glue that ties their agent stack together. Building an enterprise grade agent used to take weeks. With Eve, it now just takes minutes. Think of it as, like, the Next. Js for agents. Opinionated, open source, and it runs everywhere. [01:21:49] S0: And Vercel uses it for their whole business. Their data agent gives the whole company on demand analytics scoped to each person's permissions. Their sales agent nearly doubled pipeline coverage, and their autonomous AI sales rep platforms is in the top 10% of their human reps, you know, for only a few thousand dollars a year. [01:22:08] S1: They also rolled out new support for enterprise apps and agents because here's what every executive is realizing. Once everyone can build an agent, the hard part is knowing who can access what and what every agent is actually doing. Wouldn't it be nice to run your agents and apps inside your own cloud so that everything you build stays within your own security boundary? Vercel does exactly that. [01:22:29] S0: Vercel is your one stop shop for the agentic era. Tools, frameworks, infrastructure are all engineered to work together and built for enterprises. And one last cool thing, their ship conference is hitting more cities worldwide. So you can find out more at vercel.com/acquired. That's vercel.com/acquired, and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. Alright. So, David, before we tell the story of how Snow White came to be, we gotta tell the nickname of Snow White, the project that was going around Hollywood. Do you know what that was?
01:22:29 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[01:22:29] S0: Vercel is your one stop shop for the agentic era. Tools, frameworks, infrastructure are all engineered to work together and built for enterprises. And one last cool thing, their ship conference is hitting more cities worldwide. So you can find out more at vercel.com/acquired. That's vercel.com/acquired, and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. Alright. So, David, before we tell the story of how Snow White came to be, we gotta tell the nickname of Snow White, the project that was going around Hollywood. Do you know what that was? [01:23:02] S1: Disney's Folly. [01:23:03] S0: Yes. Yes. I think it was maybe Walt's Folly, but either way, it's the exact same thing that people said about Trip Hawkins when he was working on Madden, about Jack Bogle with Bogle's Folly with creating the Vanguard index funds. We gotta, like, start a a Folly tracker [01:23:16] S1: here on But yeah. I mean, even for Walt Disney, as successful as he and the studio have become, the idea of a feature length animated film was crazy in nineteen thirties Hollywood. [01:23:30] S0: And it had never been tried before. [01:23:32] S1: I mean, Roy tried to persuade him not to do it. He argues that it's gonna bankrupt the studio. [01:23:37] S0: Yeah. This is a multimillion dollar undertaking when, David, as you were talking about before, the shorts were, like, $15,000, $30,000 undertakings.
01:23:37 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[01:23:37] S0: Yeah. This is a multimillion dollar undertaking when, David, as you were talking about before, the shorts were, like, $15,000, $30,000 undertakings. [01:23:45] S1: Yep. Walt would say later about Snow White, we had decided there was only one way we could successfully do Snow White, and that was to go for broke, shoot the works. There would be no compromise on money, talent, or time. We did not know whether the public would go for a cartoon feature, but we were darn sure that audiences would not buy a bad cartoon feature. So good. It had to be a masterpiece or the whole thing was gonna fall apart. [01:24:12] S0: Okay. So why was this so expensive? Why was it such a giant undertaking to create a animated feature full length film? Listeners, I thought it'd be fun on this episode to dive into the process and give everyone a little primer on what are the steps to create an animated film. [01:24:30] S1: Yes. It's a true technical wonder, and you and I got to actually do it when we went to visit the Disney studio. It was so fun. [01:24:38] S0: Well, one part of one frame of it. [01:24:41] S1: Yes. One tiny part of inking and painting.
01:24:41 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[01:24:41] S1: Yes. One tiny part of inking and painting. [01:24:43] S0: Listeners will include some behind the scenes ink and paint photos of David and I in the email. So let's start with the goal. The goal is to create the illusion of motion with a series of still frames, like a ton of still frames, 24 still frames per second. So that requires a lot of clever tricks to make it economically possible, to make it consistent, and to make it enjoyable. And if you really do your job to make it emotional for the viewer. [01:25:21] S1: And to be clear, live action film is the same thing. It's an illusion. But as we talked about earlier, it doesn't cost anything to animate the humans. [01:25:31] S0: And you get physics for free. So believability comes for free. You don't have to do clever things like figure out how do things stretch and squish when someone bounces on the ground. It all just sort of happens because you're shooting it in the real world. Yep. So where does it all start? It starts with a good story. So there's something called the story department that kicks off the process with little sketches that are sort of pinned to cork boards. And so these story meetings are great. You have people acting out alongside the drawings to illustrate their idea, how the characters move and interact and talk. And Walt was famously amazing to watch when he did this acting. So this then gets put into a story reel of static sketches, just kind of illustrating the main flow of the story. At this point, it is super easy to edit, reorder, change dialogue, anything. I