Athena Portillo has had a multi-faceted career at Lucasfilm. Starting here as a Licensing Intern in 1996, she subsequently worked as Production Assistant in the Art Department at Industrial Light & Magic. She later returned to the company in 2006 as a Coordinator and Producer at Lucasfilm Animation. Athena is a veteran of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Star Wars Rebels, and is now Executive Producer on Star Wars Resistance.
Do you remember your first day here at Lucasfilm?
I just remember going through those gates at Skywalker Ranch and feeling so fortunate that I would be able to work alongside some of the most talented folks around.
Could you describe a typical “day in the life” in your position today?
In a nutshell, being an Executive Producer for a show entails a lot of communication, coordination, orchestration, facilitation and execution in making sure that everything is going according to plan to meet our weekly scheduled deadlines.
Do you have a favorite accomplishment during your time here?
Collaborating with Executive Producer and Supervising Director Dave Filoni to set-up the production workflow for every show from The Clone Wars to Rebels to Resistance has been my favorite accomplishment. I had the opportunity to also set-up the production for The Clone Wars out of the Singapore studio for six months back in 2007. That experience was so great! To be able to work there during the first season of the show and collaborating with the artists on the shot production side was unforgettable.
There’s always a way to execute the vision without breaking the bank, and I think that the workflow we’ve created allows us to make those creative adjustments. Even when we made The Clone Wars, we had an episode that we were asked to revisit. We had already locked the animatic, but we decided to pause the schedule and start over, and it didn’t break us. It goes back to that great communication.