Creating Endora’s Cartoon Fantasy
Soap Opera Weekly: How did this idea first come about?
Richard Schilling: Lisa (de Cazotte, executive producer) and Jimmy (Reilly, creator/head writer/consulting producer) had been talking about some kind of animation for a couple of years. We didn’t quite know what storyline to bring it into. Obviously, the magical part of our show makes it more plausible to have that kind of thing. We toyed with doing an entire animated episode, as opposed to this, which is partial. Certainly things like budget [determined that], as well as how much Jimmy wanted to commit the entire show to be a cartoon. I think this is a great compromise.
Weekly: Can you explain the production process — what did you do first?
Schilling: Jim wrote it as a traditional fairy tale. He didn’t do a whole lot as far as the production design and what it would look like. He just said it takes place in an enchanted forest, and the rest was up to us: How are we going to pull it off? What kind of animation it was going to be? There are varieties of animation, from the more traditional, Disney-type to a SIMPSONS/SOUTH PARK sort of thing. In the end, we got a company called Kachew. They’re actually a subsidiary of a larger company that’s done THE SIMPSONS, THE OSBOURNES, THE ANNA NICOLE SHOW and GROWING UP GOTTI. We got everyone in a room together, including our costume designer, went through the storyline, and gave our vision of what we thought this fairy-tale world should look like. They took photographs of our cast and took DVDs of our show to get familiar with the look of our show and how our actors move and talk. We went back and forth with our costume designer, and then we finally came up with storyboards of what the world would look like and how everyone would be dressed. We made some revisions based on the caricatures. For instance, we thought the actor [Justin Hartley, Fox] is more angular in his face, so we had them fix that. Once we finally settled on the look, we provided them the voice tracks, and then they started sending us pages.
Weekly: Can you explain how the voice tracks were recorded?
Schilling: We did it on the stage, with all the actors, so they could interact with each other. At first, we were going bring them individually into a booth and have them do their lines, but we thought it would be more creative and more interesting if we directed on-stage. We figured they could play off each other in the way they read the part.
Weekly: Any surprises?
Schilling: It was seamless. The guys over at Kachew are just so on top of things. The most important thing was communicating and making sure we’re on the same track. They’ve got a very rigid production schedule, and it worked like magic.
Weekly: Are you open to doing future animated sequences?
Schilling: I hope so. It was a lot of fun. We’ll see how people respond to it. I think people will enjoy it. It’s a fun way to see the characters in a new light, and hopefully they’ll be entertained by it.
Find out more about Endora’s cartoon fantasy here.
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