Ian Jones Quartey is a writer/artist for Secret Mountain Fort Awesome. He is best known for Adventure Time, Steven Universe, and creating the pilot Lakewood Plaza Turbo, in which it became a short known as OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes.
History[]
Ian Jones-Quartey has cited Secret Mountain Fort Awesome as a significant moment in his animation career. He storyboarded six episodes of the series but only three of them were produced. This show was his first time though solo boarding an entire episode of something by himself, because they didn't do a partner system on this show. Basically, when working on Secret Mountain Fort Awesome, your episode was your episode. You write and draw the entire thing from top to bottom, and that was the first time he had that responsibility.[1]
Previously, he had worked on Adventure Time as a storyboard revisionist for a couple of years before that. He loves Adventure Time, but the writing on that show is like poetry. He views it as something out of reach for himself. He fully excepts this now, at the time he really wanted to storyboard on something but Adventure Time was a little cerebral. While Secret Mountain Fort Awesome was the exact opposite. It wasn't cerebral at all, it was just hard funny stupid jokes. Just as long as it was funny and it would fit into eleven minutes, they were like "put it in the cartoon".
So Secret Mountain Fort Awesome ended up being the place where Ian learned how to pace out a story and make sure he could get a point across. The thing about the show is that the cast was all horrible disgusting monsters, and that was supposed to be the funny thing about the show. Ian wanted to approach a show differently, with his episodes he attempted to make the viewer love these monsters. He tried to make them really sensitive and very vulnerable. All his episodes were about their character insecurities. The creator of the show Peter Browngardt understood what Ian wanted to do after he explained it to him and let him have his space in this show. From all of this, Ian learned a lot about how to put together a show which was important for later in his career as an executive producer on both Steven Universe and OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes.
Also working on the show was Chris Reccardi, who was drawing over Ian's drawings to make them look amazing. He learned a lot from him. Without his experience working on Secret Mountain Fort Awesome, Ian would have never had the chance to make the Lakewood Plaza Turbo pilot.[2]