Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1541514
areas, mid-1934 to late 1938, from the Library of Congress in big, bold beautiful color. There were not many of these photos, but suddenly the people weren't history or ancestors, they were relatives and my contemporaries. These were vibrant reds, blues and greens, patterns and prints that suddenly felt tangible. I could see a woman wrapping her hair in the morning in a white scarf with a small yellow flower print, or the new paint on a house or shack. The color of the cans and bags in a makeshift kitchen of a sharecropper shack on one of the various plantations. This all existed because the FSA (Farm Services Agency) had a contract with the government, under Franklin D. Roosevelt, to document the agriculture industry throughout Southern and Northeast America with photos and filmed interviews. A propaganda of sorts to bring people into the farming industry as pickers and laborers. It added a whole new understanding of the time period. Color became a driving force in the creative collaboration. Come December of 2023, I started to see where the world and the environment wanted to go, and the themes within the story that I wanted the environment to mirror and extend. I did a few sketches of the main sets, The Juke Joint (red), the church (white), Annie's store/house (blue), as if in a trance, one right after the other. When I was done, I took photos of the sketches with my phone and sent them to Ryan. He was on board with the direction, and we both dug in to the color concept. What did each color mean to us, thematically and ideologically? Ryan wanted to bring in black for Jedidiah (the hardliner), Sammie's minister father. My first instinct was to make it so that we experienced the church two ways to incorporate both white and black, on two different mornings, bookending our time in 1932 Clarksdale. The first early morning after Sammie finishes up his work in the field, he goes to the church looking for his guitar. Ryan wanted Sammie to feel daunted by the church, by his father, and his fathers' expectations. He wanted Sammie to challenge his father a bit in the scene, if not defy him for the blues music that pulls him away that morning. The double entry doors are wide C. SMOKE SHOOTS A THIEF IN DOWNTOWN CLARKSDALE, MS. AUGMENTED LOCATION (3 BLOCKS) OF DOWNTOWN DONALDSONVILLE, LA. PRODUCTION STILL. D. FIRST PENCIL ON PAPER SKETCH OF JEDIDIAH'S CHURCH AT SUNFLOWER PLANTATION, CLARKSDALE, MS. SKETCH BY HANNAH BEACHLER. E. JEDIDIAH'S CHURCH. PHOTOSHOP ILLUSTRATION BY TESSA WESSELS. C D E