Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1349602
5 0 P E R S P E C T I V E | M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 2 1 Background I first met with Aaron about doing the proect in September 018. It was right around the same time as the Senate confirmation hearings for Brett avanaugh's Supreme Court appointment and we had a great conversation about how his script speaks to the political landscape of '8-' and to what we're facing right now. We talked at length about how past and present moments were collapsing and how, from a design perspective, the key challenge for this film is how to translate the space of the courtroom into a compelling character. Process As I sat down with the script, I started building a huge library of imagery. What I wanted to bring to the proect was the visual sense of history repeating itself, noting how elements of what was happening during the Chicago trial was echoing in current events. The question was how to portray it without doing a documentary. The design lens had to honor history while allowing viewers to relate to the politics of the past as well as the present. Photographic research was the Art Department's main focus and we tapped into archives at the Library of Congress, state libraries and personal collections. We dug into graphic representations from that time period, looking at the posters, iers and buttons which were essential forms of communication in the late '0s. Including these signifiers was a way to ground viewers, especially in the scenes of the SDS student oce, the Black Panther oce, yippie gatherings and Dave Dellinger's group. T h e T r i a l o f t h e C h i c a g o 7 E C H O E S O F H I S T O R Y B Y S H A N E V A L E N T I N O , P R O D U C T I O N D E S I G N E R A