Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1542693
T H E F A N T A S T I C F O U R : F I R S T S T E P S | P E R S P E C T I V E 8 1 When I first sat down with director Matt Shakman to talk about The Fantastic Four: First Steps, it was evident we weren't simply making a superhero film, we were designing a civilization. The conceptual brief was clear: What if the retro- futuristic dreams of the 1950s and '60s had actually come to pass? And more specifically: What if that future had a central author—Reed Richards? The story required an alternate American mid- century that looked familiar at a glance but quickly revealed that history had split at a crucial moment. That moment was the birth of Reed Richards. Assuming Reed was born around 1930, by 1950, his influence begins to alter the trajectory of the built world. In this timeline, the jet age and the technological futurism that in our world mostly lived on the covers of Popular Science and comic books become reality. It isn't an imagined future; it's the architecture of daily life. Everything built before 1950 would be the same as in our timeline; the Victorian era, Art Deco, the Streamline era, but anything constructed post-1950 begins to reflect a world in which the powerful thinking of Reed Richards, Mr. Fantastic, is at play. To give that idea a visual language, we leaned heavily into two architectural giants of the mid- century: Oscar Niemeyer and Eero Saarinen. Niemeyer's Cathedral of BrasÃlia and his Alvorada A. CONCEPTUAL ILLUSTRATION OF OUR RETRO-FUTURISTIC TIMES SQUARE BY JOE STUDZINSKI. HE STARTED WITH A BLENDER MODEL ROUGHED IN BY ART DIRECTOR LAURA MILLER. IT WAS DEVELOPED FURTHER BY JOE IN BLENDER AND THEN ILLUSTRATED IN PHOTOSHOP. B. POSTER. GRAPHIC LAYOUT BY JASON SWEERS. MADE IN ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR. B