The Wingfeather Saga is an animated short film based on best selling novels of Andrew Peterson. The warm look of visuals is inviting. I loved how 3D visuals are rendered to achieve the hand drawn look. It’s as if everything 3D has been painted frame by frame in the post production. It’s indeed a rich cell shaded look. This short film is actually a pilot episode for a series but overall it does stand on it’s own.
The scale of world is huge. We are given relevant information in the film by an actual storyteller in a classy way. I am huge fan of Nicholas Kole’s designs, they shine in this animated short too. If you have the time do look up Nicholas Kole‘s designs for the game Shardbound, they are truly awesome!!
Every film needs an epic emotional moment, which will stay with the audience. A moment, where visuals, music, words/silence, context, subtext and emotions will flow in magical way to create ever lasting moment. The great films have this one thing in common, they have one or two moments like this. It’s generally hard thing to pull off. This emotionally rich moment need to exist organically stemming from the core of the story and the character. This moment eventually takes the audience closer to the story world.
And The Wingfeather Saga has this moment. It’s the moment where little Leeli starts to sing the song!!! It’s a magnificent. The voice, music, visuals everything becomes appears as if it’s magic. It defines overall feel of this world.
Like we talked in the past,
The 10 Goals of the Great pitch are
1. Establishing the world Setting
2. Establishing the lead character
3. Introducing Fascinating Ultimate Quest
4. Conveying The Style of the show
5. Successfully introducing The Tone
6. Demonstrating The Stakes
7. Building up expectations
8. Introducing Likeable characters (including Villain)
9. Creating A Great Hook
10. Showing Hints of Exploration Points and Exciting Possibilities
The Wingfeather Saga achieves these goals impressively and it seems within natural flow of story. Nothing is forcefully pushed. I really hope The Wingfeather Saga gets picked for a series.
Here’s an official Description
Based on the best-selling novels, the epic saga comes to life in an all-new animated short film! For twelve-year-old Janner Igiby, life in Glipwood is anything but adventurous. His only escape is the stories he reads at Books and Crannies. Janner’s dream of adventure becomes a perilous reality when his sister, Leeli, stumbles into a Fang of Dang and his little brother, Kalmar, finds a mysterious map that may lead to the powerful Jewels of Anniera.
Thousands of Kickstarter backers helped us get this far. You can help us make the whole series by sharing this everywhere!
Please do share it as much as you can, It deserves to be a series!!
Mahesh Pagar
PS : This article was originally written for KennyRoy.com
