A filmmaker shocked his girlfriend by working with an animator for months to edit himself and his girlfriend into her favorite Disney movie so that he could give her a true fairy tale wedding proposal.
On December 30th, Lee Loechler uploaded a video on to YouTube of his proposal to his longtime girlfriend, Dr. Sthuthi David, at a special screening of Disney's Sleeping Beauty at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, Massachusetts and the video has quickly gone viral.
Loechler first got the idea for the proposal when a friend of his was planning to propose to his girlfriend a few years ago. Loechler told him that he should "Forrest Gump" himself into his girlfriend's favorite movie and then have the movie version of himself toss the ring to the real life person for the proposal. His friend did not end up using the idea, so it was free for Loechler to use. His problem, though, was that David's favorite movie was a cartoon!
So when Loechler started to think of his own proposal, he re-visited his idea by contacting Kayla Coombs, an Australian illustrator and character designer, and hired her to design animated versions of Loechler and David and work with him to edit the characters into Sleeping Beauty.
The whole process took six months.
The next step was to plan the screening, and after working out a deal with the Coolidge Corner Theatre, Loechler then created a fake e-mail from David's mother (while working in concert with her mother, of course) telling David that her family had purchased tickets to the screening and asking her if she wanted to invite Loechler, as well. As he noted to People magazine, “It was a proud moment when she called me a few days later and invited me to her own surprise proposal… She didn’t suspect a thing!”
Loechler surreptitiously hid their friends and family in the back rows of the theater and filled the rest of theater up with "seat fillers" that he recruited over social media. When the key moment comes where Prince Phillip goes to kiss Aurora, suddenly Aurora's features change to look like David.
David, of course, at first thought that something was wrong with the film, until Phillip also changed into a version of Loechler. The animated version then "tossed" the ring to the real life Loechler, who then proposed to her (using some heart-themed jokes, due to David being a cardiologist). Loechler even timed it so that the characters on the screen would interact with them on more time, as they told Loechler to speed things up.
After David accepted, the film then "accidentally" showed an alternate ending in case David said no, with sad versions of the Seven Dwarves. After they departed, the movie theater put a congratulatory note on the marquee.
The couple hasn't begun planning the wedding just yet, but the odds are high that there will be at least some sort of Disney them involved.
Via People.