Riding a Wave of Creativity

October 2008

Inspiration is an elusive quality and often defies description. But as difficult as it may be to explain what triggers an idea, it is fascinating to follow the creative process, because it’s one thing to have an idea and quite another to execute it properly. And when the result is a quality children’s show that delights young audiences, the whole endeavor can be inspiring.

Such is the case with the five creators highlighted here. What makes their work extra-special is the fact that they look beyond potential ratings, license fees and merchandising revenues, focusing instead on the love of their craft and all the while demonstrating a deep respect for their viewers.

One wanted to make quality programs for his daughter, another was an elementary school teacher who wanted to have a greater impact on children, yet another wanted to serve four-year-olds, the age at which he claims humans peak, and the last two wanted to make children laugh and in the process inspire them to use their imaginations to build creations of their own.

Humor is a sure-fire way of capturing a kid’s attention, and making them laugh through mischievous antics and plain old silliness is a recipe for success.

When Phineas and Ferb premiered on Disney Channel, it ushered in a very different style of animation, with multiple high-action story lines and a quirky sense of humor that immediately set it apart from the usual Disney animated fare.

The series features stepbrothers Phineas and Ferb, who are determined to beat boredom each and every day of their summer vacation. Keeping busy includes building a backyard beach complete with a surfing competition, creating a new season—one with both sun and snow—called “swinter,” assembling a theme-park roller coaster across their town and becoming overnight pop-music sensations with the song “Gitchi-Gitchi-Goo (I Love You)”.

Their sister Candace keeps trying to fink them out to their mother, but is never able to and gets more and more incensed at them. And all the while their pet platypus, Perry, hangs around making strange purring/chirping sounds, appearing to be an ordinary domestic pet, but in reality is a secret agent, reporting to the authoritative Major Monogram, and battling the evil genius Dr. Doofenshmirtz.

Needless to say, the series quickly became a top-rated show on Disney Channel, and this kind of zaniness emerged from the fertile imaginations of Dan Povenmire, who previously worked on Family Guy, The Simpsons, SpongeBob SquarePants and Rocko’s Modern Life, and Jeff “Swampy” Marsh, who has also worked on The Simpsons and Rocko’s Modern Life and had spent six years working in the U.K. on various projects for the BBC and ITV.

The two had collaborated 16 years ago and enjoyed the experience so thoroughly that they came up with the idea for Phineas and Ferb as an opportunity to work together again. “I actually drew the first Phineas on a paper napkin at a restaurant one night, then went home and drew three more characters,” says Povenmire. “I brought them to work and said, ‘This is the show,’ and Swampy said, ‘Ooooh yes!’ and we came up with ideas of how they were all interrelated.”

“We wanted a show with multiple story lines, a little bit like The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show,” adds Marsh. “We wanted to have different adventures happening at the same time.” Various story lines are not usual for an animated kids’ show, and that was one of the reasons the series took so long to be picked up by a channel. “We’ve always been firm believers that you shouldn’t talk down to kids and that’s part of the trouble we had selling this show,” explains Povenmire. “At most of the networks we pitched, it would get way up in the echelons, because they liked the initial idea, but the reason they would give us for not picking up the show would always be, ‘It seems too complicated.’ And I would always answer, ‘Too complicated? Really? You think your kids are that dumb?’ I think that kids like shows that challenge their brains just a little bit. They like to see stuff from a lot of different of angles.”

And as Marsh explains, if there is something that doesn’t make sense to the audience, it stimulates them to figure out what a word means or what a reference is about. “We remember listening to Monty Python records when we were kids and not having any idea of what half the stuff was but the more we learned about it, the more we realized how clever the humor was and the more it made us want to learn more,” says Povenmire. “We should never talk down to kids in a way that assumes that they’re not going to learn any more than what they know right now.”

Finally, Disney did pick up the show, mainly, explains Povenmire, because they wanted one with boys in lead roles. “And as soon as they took the pilot and showed it to kids, it tested through the roof.”

For Povenmire and Marsh, part of the fun of the show is being able to write a song for nearly every episode, something they had done together when they worked on Rocko’s Modern Life. “I can remember songs from shows like the Flintstones or The Archies, although I can’t remember a single actual story line!” says Povenmire. “But we both remember the songs and we feel that if we write a song for a show that can get stuck in a kid’s head [for life], that’s the sort of this immortality that we like!”

Povenmire and Marsh are intent on making the show funny and entertaining, but as parents, they want to make sure they are producing a series that is appropriate for kids. As mischievous as Phineas and Ferb are, they are never disrespectful of adults.

“This was a decision we made early, early on because we’ve both worked on a lot of different shows, and one of the easiest ways of writing comedy is to go to the mean place, especially with kids,” explains Povenmire. “We decided never to have Phineas and Ferb sniping at Candace, never do that brother-sister-yelling-at-each-other thing.”

And despite the outrageous grandiose schemes they keep concocting, they have no clue that they are doing something wrong because Phineas and Ferb never get in trouble. “We decided to make them complete innocents, and it was very hard at first for the writing staff to get the gist of that,” recalls Povenmire.

“We had to convince them that you can be edgy without being mean. And you can. It’s just harder,” adds Marsh. “Once they got used to it, we got all sorts of great humor out of Phineas and Ferb without the meanness.”

As much as Povenmire and Marsh relish this opportunity to work together once again, the show offers them a special bonus. As Marsh explains, “one of the most rewarding things I’ve read on blogs is that the reason moms like Phineas and Ferb is that after their kids watch an episode they’ll seem to be inspired to go out and use their imaginations and create something. I get choked up when I read that stuff.”

GIRL POWER

If Phineas and Ferb resonates particularly well with boys, H2O: Just Add Water is all about empowering young girls, a life mission for the show’s creator, Jonathan Shiff. He felt his young daughter didn’t have any good programs to watch on TV and was determined to do something about it, although it took some work to reach his goal.

“I always had a passion for storytelling and that’s probably why I became a lawyer—lawyers are pretty good at telling stories,” quips Shiff. “You get paid to tell stories in the law profession; you don’t always get paid to do it in media. My wife and I had a daughter 23 years ago and found there was very little for her to watch and I thought, This is weird. So I took a few months off to take a film course.”

He then was hired by Crawford Productions, which in the early ’80s was a powerhouse in Australian television. “I was a lawyer for them on the understanding that they would train me as a producer,” explains Shiff. “And that was a very good training ground, I learned every aspect of production and got a 360-degree skill set that proved very useful when I became an independent.”

When he set up his own company, Jonathan M. Shiff Productions, he could finally satisfy his desire to produce suitable shows for his little girl. “At the time, it seemed to me that people were into the ephemeral—telling stories based on very thin premises without actually drilling deeper into classic structures. And so the big breakout show for us was Ocean Girl in the ’90s, which went to the Disney Channel in the U.S.”

Ocean Girl also led to some extremely fruitful partnerships for Shiff, the first with Télé Images in France. “They were very much my mentors, distributors and sales agents. And they encouraged and backed me in each of these projects, including Ocean Girl,” says Shiff.

In the last ten years it’s been ZDF Enterprises in Germany. “ZDF and I enjoy an incredibly successful friendship and strategic partnership. There are two sorts of partnerships that you do in this business. There are those that are project driven. And there those that are relationship-driven. And you’ve got to find yourself the latter because the former will last as long as the shoot, or the dailies! And that was never of interest to me. I always took a very strategic long-term vision that, You know what? I didn’t give up being a lawyer so that I can’t pay my mortgage. I need to have output deals in place. I need to have a long-term strategic partnership to mutual benefit. I structured my business in the classic mold I had been trained in many years earlier at Crawford.”

POSITIVE IMAGES

It was Shiff’s partnership with ZDF that led to his latest hit, H2O: Just Add Water. “The head of the children’s and youth-programming division at ZDF is Nicole Keeb and she has been collaborating with me and preening my stories for nearly ten years now,” he explains. “Nicole said to me, ‘You should do something underwater. Kids loved Ocean Girl, the underwater realm is just a mystery to kids.’

“I really liked the idea of teenagers who have superpowers,” Shiff continues. “In a lot of my shows there are empowered girls. That’s because I’m the father of a 23-year-old who just graduated from university. Young women constantly need empowering, strong role models, now more than ever [with] the body image [messages they] get assailed with. Girls still live in a world where they are not on a level playing field with boys, and they need to be constantly given proactive reminders that they can do anything they want to do.”

Shiff wanted to take his affection for empowered young women in lead roles and create a new show, but this time a bit edgier and darker, and mermaids fit the bill. He decided the three lead characters should be real teenagers, who develop superpowers when water touches them.

H2O has been Shiff’s biggest success. ZDF has sold the series to some 120 territories and as do all of Shiff’s shows, H2O has a glossy look to it. “I really like pushing the envelope a little bit on the production values,” he explains. “When you’ve got 22 people doing a two-camera film shoot underwater on a girl in a mermaid costume with stuntmen and stuntwomen and dive masters and dolphins, or you are in a tank where a building crane is tipping a boat so it looks like it’s capsizing underwater, you have to pinch yourself that you are making children’s television and not a movie.

“I’ve tried to take movie production values and a movie mentality to 22 minutes of kids’ drama because, let’s face it, kids are watching Harry Potter,” he continues. “Whether I like it or not, it’s Harry Potter one day and Jonathan Shiff the next. Our brand has to climb that mountain, otherwise it’s not going to get seen.”

Shiff’s new show at MIPCOM will be The Elephant Princess. “It’s a supposedly normal teenage girl who turns 16, and a guy knocks on her backyard door during her birthday party and says, ‘I’m here to take you back. You’re the princess of a magic kingdom.’ Behind him is standing an elephant. He says, ‘This is the royal elephant, it’s yours, I’ll leave it with you.’ That’s a good teenage dilemma for a 16-year-old at her birthday party! [During the series she discovers] flying carpets and magic kingdoms, and yet she is conflicted by the fact that she is a singer/songwriter for her own band and she’d rather be with the garage band than a princess in the kingdom.”

All of Shiff’s shows have an element of fantasy to them. “Fantasy lifts you into a higher concept plane and you have to reach for the stars a little bit,” he says. “You’ve got to dream a little bit to go to where you want to be next and you can’t tell kids that enough. Particularly when kids today more than ever are inculcated with so much media and so much imagery that is negative.”

A WAY WITH WORDS

Using media in a positive way was what motivated Dorothea Gillim to leave teaching, because she wanted to have an even greater impact on children.

Television and movies are replete with superheroes, but none of them are anything like Becky Botsford, a mild-mannered ten-year-old that answers the call of duty, transforms into WordGirl, and fights crime with her voluminous vocabulary. She looks like an ordinary fifth grader but is actually an alien from the planet Lexicon. She battles a wacky group of villains, from Dr. Two-Brains to The Butcher, assisted by her faithful monkey sidekick, Captain Huggy Face.

WordGirl springs from Gillim’s love for elegant speech. “The origins of the show are back when I was in ninth grade and asked my parents for a dictionary for Christmas,” recalls Gillim. “But it couldn’t be just any old dictionary. It had to be the Random House Unabridged Dictionary. I’ve always been a bit of a word geek, and one of the qualities I admire most in people is eloquence—someone who is well-spoken or a good storyteller. I aspire to that myself and thought, Wouldn’t it be cool if eloquence were a superpower, just like superspeed or superstrength? And I also wanted to create a character that had never been on TV before, and you don’t see a lot of ten-year-old superheroes.”

In creating WordGirl, Gillim was inspired by The Electric Company, a show she watched as a child. “It was superfunny. I had the very good fortune of developing the series with Jack Ferraiolo, [Electric Company’s] head writer for season one. Jack is a real comic-book geek, so our two sensibilities came together for the final product.”

What makes WordGirl stand out from other kids’ shows, aside from a healthy sprinkling of words such as ferocious, cumbersome and identity—heavy hitters for the 6- to 8-year-olds the show targets—is the three-dimensional quality of the characters. Although very silly, cartoonish and decidedly retro in look, the villains in the show have a definite human side. Humanizing the characters was specifically done so the villains wouldn’t seem too scary to young viewers.

WordGirl airs on PBS KIDS GO! and is produced by Soup2Nuts, a subsidiary of Scholastic Media, which distributes the series internationally. While entirely entertaining, its witty jokes and intelligent content enrich kids, although they are having too much fun to notice. But enhancing children is precisely Gillim’s goal. “We hope to incite kids with a love of language and a curiosity for words. If their vocabulary increases, their reading comprehension will, as well.”

Formerly a fifth-grade teacher, who earned her Masters Degree in Education at Harvard, Gillim joined the television business because she wanted to make more of a difference in children’s lives. “That’s why I went into teaching, but on some level I felt I wanted to have a bigger impact. I ended up in television almost by accident. I was hired at Tom Snyder Productions 13 years ago to develop educational CD-ROMs, and I was really bad at it. But fortunately I learned how to edit audio on the computer just as our first show, Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist, was taking off. I hopped on that and my career has evolved right alongside the company’s.” Tom Snyder Productions was bought by Scholastic Media in 2001 and its TV animation business relaunched as Soup2Nuts.

Working on WordGirl is a dream come true for Gillim. “It makes perfect sense that I’m here actually doing what I set out to do when I left teaching, which was to have a bigger impact through mass media. One of the things I love the most, besides meeting the fans and hearing how excited they are and which characters they love, I love to hear anecdotes from parents about when their kids start to use [the words they hear on the show] in daily speech. That’s when I say, Mission accomplished, in my teacher heart.”

HEROIC FUN

We’ve seen Batman, Superman, Spider-Man and now WordGirl, but never before have we seen a duckling, a guinea pig and a turtle out to save the world. But those are precisely the stars of The Wonder Pets!, created by Josh Selig, who not only writes and produces preschool shows, he has lived in one—Selig was one of the preschoolers in the cast of Sesame Street during its first two seasons. Today he heads up Little Airplane Productions, a company he established in 1999 that specializes in preschool programming. Selig says he grew up believing that furry monsters, alphabets and Hooper’s Store were real, so what else could he do but make shows for 2- to 5-year-olds—no one else would take him!

Selig has built a successful business catering to the entertainment needs of preschoolers, and particularly four-year-olds. “At four years old, kids are really focused on what I consider to be the right things—friends, family, play, generosity, they are very kind and patient with each other,” he explains. “Something happens with humans as we get a little older. We get a little more focused on ‘myself’ and hording things. And for some reason right around age four seems to be this perfect [time] where kids are very creative. When music is turned on they dance. When you give them paints, they paint. They have a lot of unselfconsciousness that adults simply don’t have. And it really leads to an imaginative, open creative and beautiful time of life.”

After college, Selig returned to Sesame Street as a writer. He later directed short films and worked on the Israeli-Palestinian co-production of the show. Along the way he won ten Emmys, but he has always remembered what head writer Norman Stiles told him. “He used to remind me, ‘Josh, these characters have souls,’ and that changed my whole perspective on how I would write,” explains Selig. “Often when it comes to writing children’s material, writers do it in a very two-dimentional way. We don’t here. We take our scripts very seriously. We’ve been known to easily go through ten drafts of a script until we get it right. And to me it’s all about that texture. It’s what’s really the underlying meaning of the script. And if there isn’t some real weight to it or importance, then chances are we’ll move on and find other subjects to write about.”

The first show Little Airplane sold was Oobi, featuring bare-hand puppets adorned with eyes, hair, clothing and minimal props. The series now airs on Noggin. Selig and his team are currently working on two shows. The Wonder Pets! is about three classroom pets who sing opera and travel the world to save animals in distress and airs on Nick Jr., and 3rd & Bird is a commission for CBeebies about living in a community and is full of singing, whistling and dancing.

Selig not only has a different approach to writing children’s material, he has organized the workspace at Little Airplane in a completely different layout from traditional production companies. Everyone involved in a show—writers, designers, animators, producers and editors—all work in the same space. This setup facilitates communication and the sharing of ideas.

Both The Wonder Pets! and 3rd & Bird are produced in a unique way that combines the rich colors of real photographs with the flexibility of animation. This “photo-puppetry” animation, created by Jennifer Oxley, the creative director at Little Airplane, allows animators to manipulate photos of real animals in a process they call “cutification.” The animators take an image of a character and the backgrounds and make them sweeter by pushing back the harsher textures and bringing out the softer ones.

A WELL OF IDEAS

Selig says he gets his inspiration from all different places. “On The Wonder Pets! I was really interested in the idea of creating superheroes [whose] only superpower is the ability to use teamwork, which is something every preschooler has. It was a very empowering idea for a show—if you work with your friends and family, you can accomplish amazing things. It’s a show without villains, which is also unusual when it comes to superhero shows. So there are these very familiar characters—pets, which most children have—who can really do these exceptional things.”

3rd & Bird was triggered by some images Selig had seen of interesting handmade birdhouses. “It struck me as a great idea for the setting of a show—a very beautiful birdhouse in a tree,” he explains. “I was also interested in the idea of a community and what is possible when a community looks inward to solve problems. The Wonder Pets! is a show where the pets leave their classroom to help others in outside places. 3rd & Bird is a show where the problems are solved locally.”

All of Selig’s shows make use of music. “Music is a strong pull for any young child,” he says. “We believe that music is one of the key elements in the success of any show. It helps tell a story. It adds an emotional depth to any plot. It helps the children feel what’s going on. I can’t even remember a time when we pitched a show where the music wasn’t central to the plot.”

Introducing young children to many musical styles is only one way that Selig sets his company apart from the rest. “We really came into this business to make content as an end; it wasn’t to make money, it was to make content,” he explains. “We are more than happy to do just a couple of series and do them really well and be really happy with each and every image, and each and every episode. We would rather love everything we do and not do so much of it, than to do lots and lots of series and feel that they were mediocre or they weren’t our best possible work. We’re really much more about making great work than we are about pursuing a business plan or hitting a new target. Of course, we want to survive and we are happy to prosper, but we are really focused on making great shows, first and foremost.”