Soar, Princess of the Sky

  • Brian Williams

This was part of a series of fake movie trailers that get interrupted by cell phones, reinforcing how irritating it is when the actual movie gets interrupted by one.

I have always loved traditional cel animation, and going this route made it even less likely the audience would recognize it as fake.
Copywriter Tom Lord, producer Judy Wittenberg and I worked with Disney directors Saul + Elliot to shape the all-too-familiar story of infighting amongst wildlife. Legendary animator Mark Henn (Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Simba, Tiana—he's that guy) provided the character designs for our titular protagonist.
Recording the soundtrack with a 105-piece orchestra at Sony was an amazing, humbling experience. Steve Hampton's score still sits on my desk.
In case you find this kind of thing interesting, here's the Soar color script.
Feature films use a color script during preproduction to plan out how the dramatic tones of the written script will manifest themselves in the colors on screen. Here is a gorgeous example from Dice Tsutsumi. Anyway, because a trailer—even a fake one—would typically feature scenes from the front, middle and back of a film, creating this color script helped us get a feel for the beats of our story, even though it's a story we only tell skeletally. Compare to the thumbs at the top of the post to see how closely the finished piece stuck to the script.
And finally, below is the official Soar, Princess of the Sky movie poster, illustrated by none other than Drew Struzan. We really went all out!

Companies

  • A

    AMC Theatres

    Skills