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“Ryan said, ‘I want it to be what it’s like down there. It should be dark. You don’t have to see too far,’” White recalls. “The director of photography as well was like, ‘It’s okay to let things fall off in the darkness. You don’t have to see everything.’ So it was okay for things to get out of focus and blurry back there, because that’s what it looks like down there.”
He continues, “With the tank footage we shot, there was a lot of cloudiness in the tank and I thought, ‘Oh, they’re never going to let us get away with having it that cloudy.’ But they said, ‘No, let’s go with that. That’s what it looks like.’ Some of the compliments I had from some of my friends who dive and saw the film said, ‘That’s what it feels like when you go underwater.’ So it was nice to the filmmakers were embracing that and allowed us to do that.”
That attention to detail extended to the design and construction of Talokan’s capital city itself, with White adamant that the undersea metropolis had to be a functional, working environment in addition to a richly multi-dimensional cultural center.
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“Even before we get into rendering, we’re asking, how big is the city? How is this relative to the size of Chicago? How many people would be in there? What would be the districts?” says White. “You know, all of those kinds of principles. How do they light the walls? There are designs in the architecture that are actually filtration systems that are filtrating the water and all kinds of things that you wouldn’t know as you whip by. But all of those little details, we try to ask, can we ground this in science? Everything needs to have a purpose, or a reason, so we look at those things and try and take that in mind.”
It’s that incredible, precise attention to every detail—whether it be the way that the Talokanil move through the water or the colors of the historical designs on the walls of Namor’s throne room—that makes Talokan and the overall world of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever seem so real to viewers, even if they don’t necessarily notice every tiny aspect themselves. At least not consciously.
“The viewers are so sophisticated when things don’t look right, and they have such a critical eye in a good way,” says White. “What we found is that unless you put those details in there, you can feel when they’re not there. Whether they can see it or not, they can kind of feel that something’s off. It’s those little micro-details that add to the realism. So when we dig into it like that, whether it’s visible or not, we know that it helps the overall picture.”
