Farnaz Esnashari-Charmatz is the creator and executive producer of Shimmer and Shine. She also voices Gigi in two episodes. Farnaz was the post production supervisor for Dora the Explorer, My Life As A Teenage Robot, Go, Diego, Go!, and Ni Hao, Kai-Lan. She started working at Nickelodeon in 2005.
By 2009, she was pitching her own ideas for shows. One of them was a show called Shimmer and Shine, which was turned into a pilot episode in 2013. It was approved for a full series before the pilot was even finished.
In an interview, Farnaz described the pitching process of the show:
- So, by December of 2012 I turned in my pitch and [Nickelodeon] called me and said, 'Okay start thinking about the next steps.' I thought I was going to have a couple months off. But by April 2013, they said, 'Okay, we’re picking you for pilot.' So, then we had to find writers and storyboard artists and basically take this whole thing into production and normally the process is that you make a pilot, you get it animated, you get it back, you test the heck out of it and then based on that they will either pick the show up for series or not.
- We got picked up for series before we had even shipped the pilot, so we were still in the works of figuring everything out and they gave us a writing pickup. So, by August 2013 we had a writing pickup, by November 2013 we had a full production pickup and I think in January 2014 we shipped the pilot. It happened so fast! - Link to interview
Adaptation[]
The character Farnaz introduced in season 4 was named after her.
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