Jane the Virgin star Justin Baldoni is in Canada to direct a movie about Zach Sobiech, a terminally ill teenager whose song inspired millions.
Cameras are set to roll in Montreal on Clouds, a Warner Bros. film based on Laura Sobiech’s 2014 book Fly A Little Higher: How God Answered a Mom’s Prayer in a Big Way.
Baldoni previously directed a short documentary about Zach for his My Last Days series.
No casting details have yet been made public.
Sobiech started writing music at 14, after he was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a rare form of bone cancer. In 2012, when he was 17, doctors told him he had less than a year to live.
“Music is a way I can express myself without having to burden everyone else,” Sobiech explained in his My Last Days episode. “My closure is being able to get my feelings into these songs so they can have something to remember me by or lean on when I [am] gone.”
He wrote and recorded “Clouds” and posted it on YouTube in December 2012.
"I fell down, down, down into this dark and lonely hole / There was no one there to care about me anymore," he sang. "And I needed a way to climb and grab a hold of the edge."
The video garnered more than 3 million views by the time Sobiech died in May 2013, shortly after his 18th birthday, and has since surpassed 14 million views. The song went to No. 26 on the Billboard Hot 100 and hit No. 14 in Canada.
In 2013, a long list of celebrities – including Colbie Caillat, Jason Mraz, Sara Bareilles, Andy Grammer, Lumineers, Jason Derulo, Passenger and Phillip Phillips – paid tribute to Sobiech by lip-syncing “Clouds” in a video shared on YouTube.
"Thank you, Zach. You've written a great song, dude," Mraz says at the end of the video. "It's a real pleasure to sing it, and sing it with you."
That same year, an estimated 5,000 people gathered in Sobiech’s native Minnesota to sing “Clouds.”