Riyadh Season Promos
Client:
GEA
Production:
UNIT9
Role:
Creative Director
Year:
2024
Riyadh Season is one of the world's largest entertainment festivals, drawing 4 million visitors in its first month in 2024 across 14 entertainment zones spanning 7.2 million square metres.
For its fifth edition, GEA needed a suite of CG promo films to announce eight of its new zones to audiences worldwide.
Eight films. Eight weeks. Eight completely different licensed IPs — including Disney, La Liga, Blippi, Cocomelon, and Five Nights at Freddy's.
Each film had to feel true to its IP, meet the approval of the IP owner, satisfy GEA's vision for the season, and sit coherently alongside the other seven as a campaign. The brief wasn't just to make eight trailers — it was to make eight trailers that felt like they belonged together.
Results
8
Films
8
Weeks
8
Licenses
How was it made?
Eight IPs, three approval layers each
The production ran eight parallel creative workstreams simultaneously, each with its own IP, its own stakeholder chain, and its own visual world. Managing that without losing coherence, or momentum, was the central challenge.
The stakeholder structure alone was complex. Every film had three layers of approval: UNIT9's own quality bar, GEA's creative and strategic sign-off, and the IP owner's validation of how their brand and characters were being represented. Disney, La Liga, and the others each had their own standards and sensitivities. Getting all three parties aligned on each film, eight times over, in eight weeks, required a clear process and a lot of simultaneous conversations.
Locking the rules before opening the brief
The creative solution to the coherence problem was to lock a set of shared rules across all eight films before any of them went into production: the same camera movement logic, a consistent narrative arc applied to each world, and music that shared a compositional identity while being tailored to the tone of each individual IP.
Those fixed points created a visual and structural language that held the campaign together, freeing each film to fully inhabit its own IP without the suite fragmenting into eight unrelated pieces.
Pencil first, pixels second
At the centre of each film was a bespoke sculptural element representing its IP world. Before any 3D modelling began, those sculptures were pre-visualised and validated with clients at concept stage — locking the key visual in pencil first, then moving into 3D, and finally camera movement.
That sequence kept the approval process clean and prevented costly late-stage changes from compressing an already tight timeline.
Zlaten del Castillo
Creative Director
London, UK
Brussels, Belgium
Available globally
All work shown with permission. All rights belong to the respective clients and production companies.