Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1535796
the Black super soldier trapped away for decades, and what Ross had been doing to Samuel Sterns in all those years since Sterns inadvertently created the Abomination. The set instead became about putting those characters into simple, tight, decaying boxes and then playing with reflections, transparencies and color to emphasize Sam learning about Sterns' manipulations. Research of mid-century psychiatric prisons revealed an experiment where clinicians used colored light to control prisoners' moods. This inspired the idea of Sterns using light for his mind control. The film's version of that original light fixture, ostensibly from the '50s, was large and chunky, as seen in the first prison cell. Then, in the lab set, Joaquin discovers a series of devices where the lighting is more and more miniaturized —and more and more blue. But when Sterns activates the guards to attack, the lights shift to red, emphasizing how anger is taking over and connecting Sterns to the Red Hulk he is creating. The color script allowed the production to carefully plan how color would underlie our story, placing red only where it served the most value and showing how our other colors illuminated the flow from control to chaos. It also allowed us to explore the shape language of the movie. Our second guiding principle in the film was how Sam and Ross both saw themselves in boxes and how the arc of the movie is how they get out of them. Viewers first see Sam in a sequence where he fights the Serpent Society in a chapel. That sequence had a long history, starting in the slums of Manila, then shifting to a market in Istanbul. The production realized this didn't really fit our theme of Sam starting out in a box, where he felt constrained by his various expectations of filling the role of Cap. So, we moved instead to the idea of being inside a private jet hangar in Cancun. Due to various location and aircraft issues, this became untenable, so we moved the fight out to the tarmac, but then carried it into a very cool, but very tight, private airport lounge built into an existing small terminal in Atlanta. Sam ended the fight victorious, but still contained. In the long run, though, this fight still didn't serve the purpose of the movie. It had the narrative thread needed—Sam saves the day and gets the Adamantium from the bad guys—but it felt like a spectacle and didn't move the emotional story forward. When Clint Wallace took on the reshoots, he looked for a space not seen in Marvel before that better fit the streamlined character arc. The cemetery and sacred chapel they found were not only great looking and fit the visual themes of the movie, but the environment put Sam in the emotional space that set up the rest of the movie. The place where this theme worked most clearly was in the final battle between Sam and Red Hulk. Ross's journey started in the film with him tightly framed behind stage, revealed in broken E. CAMP ECHO ONE. ORIGINAL PANOPTICON CONCEPT CONCEPT ART BY JOSEPH COMEAU IV. E