Art Directors Guild : Perspective – Memory, Transition and Afrofuturism BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER

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Perspective

Memory, Transition and Afrofuturism BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER

BY HANNAH BEACHLER, PRODUCTION DESIGNER

January - February 2023

ABOVE: NORTHERN TRIANGLE FUNERAL PROCESSION. ILLUSTRATION BY VICKI PUI USING MODO AND PHOTOSHOP.

I’ve been struggling trying to write this article, stopping and restarting. I’ve struggled with how to talk about Chadwick most of all. But too, how does one not mention all that transpired after March 13, 2020, or sometime thereabout. Our lives changed at the core. The way we worked changed. The people we lost changed us. It was a rollercoaster of emotion coming through the television, social media, almost everything online. Productions shut down all over the country, the world, and people rushed home to be with their loved ones and find safety. As summer approached, emotions escalated on a whole new level under the weight of racial tensions, centuries old and viscerally present, that seemed to have burst wide open after the murder of George Floyd. Meanwhile, we were quarantined for months, wiping down groceries, and trying to find N95 masks, worried about sending our kids back to school. I knew Panther was coming and that I could escape from everything to focus on the movie and pour myself into world building and designing.

The film started preproduction July 2020. We learned how to tackle collaborating and meeting for hours over Zoom, we used art boards to share concepts online, etc. As the team assembled, scripts were being distributed, things were moving, slowly, but moving, nonetheless. The process felt, at least, familiar.

August 28, 2020, Chadwick Boseman passed away after a long battle with colon cancer. It was numbing. My first thoughts were of his family and friends. I thought about Ryan [Coogler] and how he was handling the loss of his close friend, someone he called Brother.

Ryan stepped away to reflect and grieve his friend’s passing. After some time, he decided Chadwick would want him, us, eveyone involved in the film to continue, to do the very thing we love, and that he loved, too. And that’s what we did. The tone of the story very much shifted in purpose from what it was, our drive and strength to create an homage to Chadwick and a story of overcoming grief and loss heightened. We had something to say, a tribute to make to a great friend, human, husband, sibling, son, humanitarian and a hero to so many young kids across the world.

MAYAN VILLAGE. LLUSTRATION BY VICKI PUI USING MODO AND PHOTOSHOP.

MAYAN VILLAGE. SET PHOTO.

Talokan

Memory was the main design tenet of the new world, Talokan. Ryan Coogler, director of Wakanda Forever, and I started talking about a new underwater world for the second installment of Black Panther in December 2019. He talked about the people of the new world being direct descendants of the Maya of Yucatan, Mexico. He told me the story of how and why the Mayans, in our story, went into the ocean. We talked about who they were, what they wanted for themselves, their children, and community. It’s like sitting around a campfire long ago and listening to stories about great civilizations from a griot.

NAMOR’S BIRTH. PRODUCTION STILL

Ryan and I talked about all the possibilities for their technology, being organic, mechanical, etc., and where their civilization was located in the ocean. Ryan really wanted the world to employ as much hard sci-fi as possible, building upon known scientific principles. This required a lot of experts from all walks of life, in many disciplines—from Mexican archeologists specializing in the Maya of the lowlands, Pre-Columbian and Post Classic Mayan historians, experts specializing in the Codices and Popol Vuh, Mayan gods, agriculture, hieroglyphs and the everyday life of the people, to ocean management and invasive species researchers, hydrothermal vent and vent ecosystems researchers, marine biologists, oceanographers, free divers and so much more. Ryan and I both love research, it’s something that is naturally a part of the way we have always worked together. Another important piece of the Production Design was how the camera told the story, and how we would use darkness and light in the ocean environments

VISITORS’ QUARTERS CENOTE. PLANS AND ELEVATIONS BY TIM CROSHAW.

The Talokanil are five hundred years separated from their Mayan ancestors who went into the ocean. In 1571, they left behind their homes and way of life to save themselves from the Spanish conquistadors, who brought disease, slavery and death. Over time, the Talokanil were forced farther and farther away from the shores they knew into the depths of the ocean to avoid human encroachment and exploration of the ocean. They migrated to the Atlantic Ocean, settling in the Puerto Rican trench, a thousand miles off the coast of Puerto Rico. Having spent five centuries in the ocean, their way of life became a subtle integration of memory and evolution.

VISITORS’ QUARTERS CENOTE. PRODUCTION STILL.

NAMOR’S CENOTE. PRODUCTION STILL.

To build a memory, it was necessary to understand Mayan history that has been recorded and re-recorded, and Mayan history that functions as memory, being passed down from generation to generation orally. Talking to the film’s experts, I thought it important to research a Mayan city-state whose innovations with water systems and wetlands would be a foundation, a place to start. By understanding the history, I could understand how to build the Talokanil and their Ajaw (King) Namor. I was guided by the Mayan city-state of Palenque and the story of their Ajaw, K’inich Janaab Pakal I. Pakal became Ajaw when he was twelve years old, leading to the height of Palenque construction and innovation. He died at the unusually old age (for the time) of eighty in 683 CE. He was buried in a sarcophagus in a chamber inside the Temple of Inscriptions and was deified as the maize god for the city of Palenque. This story closely paralleled Namor’s story as he too became Ajaw at a young age, and his ability to breath underwater, breath air and walk on land gives him the ability to occupy the three realms, which would make him a deity. Palenque also had sophisticated water control systems that included aqueducts, canals and reservoirs—innovation and technology that would have been passed down generation after generation to the Maya, who in this story, were finally driven into the ocean.

NAMOR’S CENOTE MURAL. ESTABLISHMENT OF THE TALOKAN STORY BY GRAPHIC ARTIST KELSEY BRENNAN.

NAMOR’S CENOTE MURAL. SET PHOTO

All of this is where I started with building the ancestral history of the Talokanil. Using Critical Fabulation (a term coined by Saidiya Hartman, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University), which is a combining of historical and archival research with critical theory and fictional narrative to fill in the blanks left in the historical record. For the Talokanil, the design team documented their migration from Palenque in 900 CE to the Yucatan coastal port city of Tulum after the Great Drought. We created a record of their architectural development underwater over a 300-year span, and how the memory influenced their culture as it changed and evolved over time, generation after generation, to create what we now know as Talokan.

NAMOR’S CENOTE. PLAN AND. ELEVATIONS BY TIM CROSHAW.

Memory as form is in essence the translation of emotions. Talokan is Namor’s memorial of the world he once knew at the end of its reign. The greatness he knew of Maya was from oral stories and written records and manuscripts such as the Codices and the Popol Vuh. Through Namor’s quest in memorializing Maya, the originality of Talokan became material. The architecture of Talokan is the physicality of memory, which lies in the gestures the structures adopted, while also managing the provocation of thought about the life and purpose of the structure itself, and care over the architectural spectacle. Spaces appear detached from both structural soundness and reality. Beyond merely shape and color, this world had to embrace the lack of a sense of direction and gravity. It encapsulated the illusion of suspension, a connection to environment, contemplation over stability and symmetry. For some, the more separated in time you are from a memory, the more subjective it becomes, and so the creative team followed this in form and structure. The main Talokan set, Namor’s throne room, maintained this idea of memory as form, inspired by the great temples of Palenque (The Temple of Inscriptions), the walls bear the story of the travels of the Talokanil in Mayan hieroglyphs, the gestures of shapes reminiscent of Chichen Itza, Tulum and Tikal. His throne seat, a Megalodon jaw with jade teeth, features a hieroglyph carved into the bone which reads, “This Jade Tooth Bites.” Many Maya Ajaws associated themselves with the powerful, semi-divinity of sharks (Xoc in Mayan, pronounced shohk) by incorporating them into their names. Shark teeth have been found in early Maya going back to 100 CE. Namor sits in the core of that power.

NAMOR’S THRONE ROOM EXTERIOR. PRODUCTION STILL.

NAMOR’S THRONE ROOM. SET PHOTO

NAMOR’S THRONE ROOM BACKDROP. DIGITAL MODEL BY PETER RUBIN

This is not to say that the ocean played no part in dictating the design. The Talokanil settled in the Abyssal zone of the Puerto Rican Trench, and our use of hard sci-fi dictated necessities such as warmth, light, transportation, sustenance, shelter, protection and safety, both tangible and intangible. Each of these areas were also necessary to research, understand, design and build into the language of the aesthetic.

A. NAMOR’S THRONE. SKETCH BY HANNAH BEACHLER.

B. HANNAH BEACHLER ON NAMOR’S THRONE

THRONE MEGALODON JAW. HIEROGLYPH READS “THIS JADE TOOTH BITES.” SET PHOTO.

Wakanda

Through memory, we were able to capture the protopian values of community, tradition, ritual, food and family that reflect Wakanda.

Ryan and I talked extensively about how we might extend the Production Design in the world of Wakanda. A lot of the world building had a foundation from the previous movie. The design language, the costumes, the tribes and their districts, the capitol of Golden City, the palace, and a good deal of the Wakandan technology had been developed. We were able to refer to the guide created from the first film as a foundation.

This story was about the transitions of grief, overcoming loss and healing. We wanted to build those elements into the design world in Wakanda. All this combined, of course, with lighting and camera lenses, such as using anamorphic lenses and atmosphere to visually connect the fog of grief, the desire for revenge and the journey to healing by distorting the edges of the frame and distorting the clarity in any given space.

LIL’ RIVERTOWN IN GOLDEN CITY ILLUSTRATION BY CONCEPT ARTIST TILL NOWAK USING UNREAL ENGINE AND PHOTOSHOP.

LIL’ RIVERTOWN IN GOLDEN CITY. PRODUCTION STILL

JABARI CAPITOL BUILDING. SET PHOTO.

NORTH TRIANGLE. RENDERING BY SORIN POPESCU.

NORTH TRIANGLE. PRODUCTION STILL.

NORTH TRIANGLE ELEVATIONS BY GEORGE LEE.

I knew we were going to open in Shuri’s lab, a scientific and technological design center, and then cut directly to T’Challa’s wake in the Sacred Grove, a lush green forest where the spirits of the ancestors lived. Shuri in her lab, trying desperately to heal her sick brother, is surrounded by glass hydroponic towers filled with plants she’s using for gene splicing. Her environment is a built technological forest, a living computer, calculating the percentages of DNA viability. The design language lives in the juxtaposition of Shuri’s lab, and the Sacred Grove. The sets reflecting each other in form and verticality, alternating between the scientific and the natural world, the transition of materiality juxtaposed by nature.

SACRED GROVE. ILLUSTRATION BY VICKI PUI USING MODO AND PHOTOSHOP.

A. & B. SHURI’S LAB. SET PHOTOS.

Most important to the principal design in Wakanda is Afrofuturism, a movement that, through elements of Black history and culture, speaks to an autonomy and agency, in art, music, literature, etc. It speaks to time being cyclical, what once was is evolved through a new lens of futurism and science fiction. Traditions, architectural vernacular and ritual do not just evolve to be a new version of themselves, but an original form of what could be in a different future, a new timeline. Rondavels are not only the traditional vernacular (in many forms) throughout African countries and cultures, but they become self-sustaining rescue housing that can sustain life in any environment. Like the traditional rondavel, the emergency rescue huts are round to dissipate high winds and harsh weather. The Art Department considered how the huts might use their environments to create energy and water for displaced families. The design moving into an original space of necessity and accessibility. This is the way we used tradition and hard sci-fi to create an Afrofuturistic vernacular in Golden City, from public spaces to transportation.

Wakanda and Talokan are a part of a world that comes from beloved comics. And Ryan, no matter all the thought and hard sci-fi that goes into the sets and environment, knows how to make an entertaining film filled with thought-provoking characters and stories, and that is the best of Wakanda Forever. ADG

SHURI’S LAB. PRODUCTION STILL.

Hannah Beachler,

Production Designer

Brad Ricker,

Supervising Art Director

Marlie Arnold, Laurel Bergman, Jason T. Clark, Lorin Flemming,

Ron Mendell, Jesse Rosenthal, Mailara Santana,

Art Directors

Kedra S. Dawkins, Max Sweeney,

Assistant Art Directors

Chris Arnold, Vincent Bates, Tim Croshaw, Forest Fisher,

George Lee, Josh Lusby, Karl Strahlendorf, Yolande Thame, Brandon Uloho, Kevin Vickery, Dean Wolcott,

Set Designers

Harald Belker, Daniel Frank,

Fabian Lacey, Andrew H. Leung, Ed Natividad, Till Nowak,

Manuel Plank-Jorge, Vicki Pui, Peter Rubin, Nikkolas Smith, Josh Viers,

Concept Artists

Kelsey Brennan, Shaquana Simmons,

Graphic Artists

Scot Erb,

Model Maker

Lisa K. Sessions,

Set Decorator

January - February 2023

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