Cardboard Star Wars Meets Disney Storytelling at Created in LA
Zach King’s Empire Strikes Back short screened at Created in LA, where Disney and Jon Youshaei brought creators together for film premieres, collaboration discussions and lessons in rewriting.
The short answer: Zach King’s Empire Strikes Back short screened at Created in LA, where Disney and Jon Youshaei brought creators together for film premieres, collaboration discussions and lessons in rewriting.
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Zach King brought a cardboard version of a galaxy far, far away to the El Capitan Theatre. His Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back short premiered at Created in LA, a two-day gathering that put digital creators’ films on a theater screen before taking the conversation inside Disney’s studios.
Disney and creator Jon Youshaei gathered hundreds of creators for the event, which moved from the Hollywood theater to the Walt Disney Studios lot in Burbank. Youshaei brought experience on both sides of the platform relationship: he worked at Instagram and YouTube before becoming a full-time creator and interviewer.
King’s short was his second recreation of a Star Wars film using cardboard. Earlier in the first-day program, filmmaking duo Sticks premiered The Technoblade Movie, a tribute to the creator Technoblade. Together, the screenings gave the gathering a concrete starting point: work made by online creators, presented in a cinema.
Disney President and Chief Creative Officer Dana Walden highlighted something creators could teach the company: how closely they listen to their audiences.
You know them intimately, you hear from them constantly, and you adjust in real time based on what they want. Dana Walden, addressing creators at Created in LA
Where a creator’s idea could go
On the second day, Disney Chief Marketing and Brand Officer Asad Ayaz’s Your Next Big Project with Disney masterclass explored routes into scripted series, features and brand campaigns. Laughing Place’s account of the session described three possibilities Ayaz outlined: bringing an original story, offering a fresh perspective on a Disney story, or working in front of or behind the camera.
One example made those possibilities tangible. According to Laughing Place, Ayaz cited Lala Sadii’s Lala IRL, a scripted project then in development for Disney Channel and Disney+, with Sadii set to star and executive produce. The example showed how the personal storytelling behind an online following could extend into a scripted project.
Ayaz also connected digital creators’ work to Disney’s beginnings. He described Walt Disney as a storyteller whose willingness to take creative and business risks, experiment and push an idea further helped set him apart.
When a favorite scene has to go
Walt Disney Animation Studios Chief Creative Officer Jared Bush approached the exchange through the work of rewriting. His session drew on Zootopia, Moana and Encanto to examine how stories change during production—and how an idea worth pursuing can also become one worth abandoning.
Laughing Place reported that Bush discussed an earlier version of Zootopia centered on Nick Wilde, with predators forced to wear collars that shocked them when their emotions grew too strong. Bush described a scene in which a predator child received a collar as a particularly powerful part of that version. But the collar premise was preventing the larger film from working; removing it meant losing the scene, too.
That gave the room a specific creative problem to consider: protecting a favorite moment can come at the expense of the whole story. Bush also shared footage from Disney’s Hexed, pairing the look back at familiar films with a glimpse of another animation project.