Development
Shrek Art Director Douglas Rogers visited what place for inspiration for Shrek's swamp?
Shrek
At the time DreamWorks was founded, producer John H. Williams got hold of the book from his children, and when he brought it to DreamWorks, it caught Jeffrey Katzenberg's attention and the studio decided to make it into a movie. Recounting the inspiration of making the film, Williams said: After buying the rights to the film, Katzenberg quickly put the film in active development in November 1995. Steven Spielberg had thought about making a traditionally animated film of the book before, when he bought the rights to the book in 1991, before the founding of DreamWorks, where Bill Murray would play Shrek and Steve Martin would play Donkey. In the beginning of production, co-director Andrew Adamson refused to be intimidated by Katzenberg, and had an argument with him how much should the film appeal to adults. Katzenberg wanted both audiences, but he found some of Adamson's ideas about adding sexual jokes and Guns N' Roses music to the soundtrack a bit too outrageous. Andrew Adamson and Kelly Asbury joined in 1997 to co-direct the film. However, Asbury left a year later for work on the 2002 film "", and was replaced with story artist Vicky Jenson. Both Adamson and Jenson decided to work on the film in half, so the crew could at least know who to go to with specific detail questions about the film's sequences; "We both ended up doing a lot of everything", Adamson said. "We're both kinda control freaks, and we both wanted to do everything. "Some early sketches of Shrek's house were done in 1996 through 1997 using Photoshop, with the sketches showing Shrek first living in a garbage dump near a human village called Wart Creek. It was also thought one time that he lived with his parents and kept rotting fish in his bedroom. Donkey was modeled after "Pericles" (born 1994; also known as "Perry"), a real miniature donkey from Barron Park, Palo Alto, California. Raman Hui, supervising animator of "Shrek", stated that Fiona "wasn't based on any real person." and he did many different sketches for Princess Fiona and had done over 100 sculptures of Fiona before the directors picked the final design. In early development, the Art Directors visited Hearst Castle, Stratford upon Avon and Dordogne for inspiration. Art Director Douglas Rogers visited a magnolia plantation in Charleston, South Carolina for inspiration for Shrek's swamp. Planned characters not used in the film include Goldilocks and Sleeping Beauty.