Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1475854
F E AT U R E Attached to Phineas and Ferb from the start, Jill Daniels already knew the show's creators. She had worked with Dan Povenmire on developing two pilots at Disney and with Jeff "Swampy" Marsh on King of the Hill. Daniels explains that the look of the show's signa- ture characters came from Povenmire's drawing style. "Dan really, really loved where I took all the different shapes that he created for the characters, like triangles or circles, and infused them into the backgrounds," she says. Both creators resonated with the shape-based look that she gave them in her development pass, and from there they moved forward as a team. Custom brushes were created in Photoshop, pro- viding a base from which "you could launch into all the fantasy worlds that we created for Phineas and Ferb," says Daniels. It was a thrill for her whenever the show left the characters' hometown of Danville. She recalls that one episode was made to look "like they were on Chinese rice paper in ancient China," and in another, "they go to the moon and make ice cream." There was never a dull moment on what she calls "an amazingly creative journey." One of Daniels' highlights was getting to write an episode. She was having lunch with some storyboard friends who were struggling to get Perry the Platypus down to his lair one more time—a recurring gag of the show. Inspired by her love of the movie Memento, "I went to Dan and Swampy and pitched the idea of having an episode that went backwards," Daniels says. They liked the concept and let her go for it. As with every production, there were also challenges. Daniels says that board-driven shows, which historically had not done well at Disney, are hard to do "because they involve constant reboarding and rewriting. I'm so grateful we had such a super talented crew." The fact that every show had a song in it also presented its own set of obstacles to overcome, and Daniels had to do a lot of improvising on how to convey all of the show's information to the four overseas studios that worked on it at any given time. She says that "a continual stream of Art Direction sheets and creating motion graphics in Photoshop were helpful assets to give to the various overseas teams set up all around the world." Art Director Jill Daniels won two Primetime Emmys for Outstanding Individual Achievement for her work on Phineas and Ferb. Here she looks back fondly on her time with the show. BY KARIN BRINER EMMY LOOKBACK: PHINEAS AND FERB, 2007–2015 EMMY LOOKBACK: PHINEAS AND FERB, 2007–2015 32 KEYFRAME Phineas and Ferb images courtesy of Disney