Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1535796
Four countries had set up independent mining and processing facilities around the body. There was a lot of research and development about mining rare earth materials on land and underwater. At the same time, the Art Department laid out a superpowered fight sequence in the slums of Manila, first developing backlot sets from scratch, then looking at how we could turn the period New Orleans streets set being developed for Blade into Southeast Asia. In addition, we started work on Camp Echo One, the cavernous secretive prison set under Yellowstone, where superpowered individuals were held and experimented on. Finally, we laid out the interiors of the White House for the initial assassination attempt and the following chase. After about three weeks or so, we were ready to show all of this. The designs were very well-liked, but the movie just didn't feel "grounded," even though everything we did was steeped in meticulous research (a shout-out to the wonders and value of skilled researchers: thank you, Damani Mangum and Amina Dieye!!) and even though we crafted specific moments in each sequence to focus design and shots on each character's emotional journey. The design process, pursuing, as it was, the requirements in the script, revealed that the movie simply wasn't focusing on what we all wanted as filmmakers to focus on—the emotional journeys of Sam and Ross. The direction came to make everything much more real-world, even eliminating standard tech of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), like holograms. I still miss the very cool Skrull-detector we came up with! But I love how I was able to project transparent OLED technology just a little bit into the future with the large curved presentation screens in the East Room assassination scene. That allowed us to fulfill the visual needs of the scene and create a very dramatic moment when Isaiah takes his shot, shattering the screens. That screen solution outlined an important fact: "grounded" couldn't mean dull; the movie still had to be cinematic, no matter how prosaic the environments might be on the surface. I pitched an idea to Julius about color scripting the whole movie, organizing it the same way we had studied his referenced movies. We redirected Illustrator Sam Michlap to this effort, employing his background in designing animated features. As the script evolved, we developed color thumbnails of a scene, showing the action in the proposed A. COLOR SCRIPT. CONCEPT ART BY ILLUSTRATOR SAM MICHLAP. B. COLOR PALETTE. CONCEPT ART BY ILLUSTRATOR SAM MICHLAP. A