Wakanda Forever

Project Context

Wakanda Forever introduced Talokan — a Mesoamerican underwater civilization living 12,000 feet below the Atlantic Ocean. The film’s Production Designer, Hannah Beachler, was the first and only Black female Production Designer Marvel had ever hired. Her mandate was clear: Talokan had to be built on real history, real architecture, and real cultural research.

I was one of three Black set designers on a team of 35. My job was to take Hannah’s vision and the academic research behind it and turn it into something a construction crew could actually build — drawings, models, specifications, details — while making sure nothing culturally important got lost in translation.

What Was at Stake

Talokan is a Mesoamerican civilization. That means its visual language — its symbols, its proportions, its materials, its spatial logic — had to come from actual Mayan architectural and cultural research, not from imagination or generic ‘ancient civilization’ shorthand.

If any of that slipped — if a glyph was wrong, a proportion was off, a structural form was borrowed from the wrong culture — it would register to Mesoamerican communities watching the film as carelessness. Or worse, as the same erasure that Hollywood has always committed against non-Western cultures. Hannah had fought to get this right. My job was to make sure it stayed right all the way through to construction.

Structural Complexity

Cultural accuracy. Every architectural detail had to be grounded in real pre- and post-classical Mesoamerican research. There was no room for invention where accuracy was possible.

The wet-for-wet / dry-for-wet problem. Sets were filmed two ways: actors and cameras actually in 80-foot water tanks, and on dry stages lit and dressed to look underwater. I had to design sets that worked convincingly in both conditions.

The red light problem. Red light disappears first as you go deeper underwater. Namor’s throne room needed to read as red — a culturally significant color in Mayan design — while still looking physically believable at depth. That required designing the carved relief forms specifically so VFX could preserve the red without it looking fake through a simulated water column.

Coordination across three teams. My drawings had to work for the construction crew building the physical sets and as reference for Weta FX extending those sets digitally. Three different teams, three different needs, one set of documents.

My Role

I was responsible for translating cultural research into construction-ready documentation. I read the academic sources on Mesoamerican architecture, worked with the research consultants, and turned that knowledge into technical drawings, carved relief designs, spatial layouts, and material specifications that builders could follow without losing what made the design meaningful.

The specific sets I worked on included Namor’s Throne Room (primary Talokan ceremonial space, including the carved reliefs and the red light challenge), the Yucatán hut structures (including the memory room where Shuri receives the bracelet from Namor, with the painted iconography on the walls), the Talokan civic spaces (dressed with statuary, agricultural motifs, offering spaces), the royal aircraft entry sequence, the 1571 Yucatán flashback sets at Las Palmas Beach in Puerto Rico, Riri Williams’ MIT dorm, and the scouting ship helipad where vibranium is first discovered.

Specific Decisions I Made

On the throne room, I designed the carved relief forms to be sculptural enough to catch and hold red light — so VFX had surface geometry to work with when rendering the red wavelength at depth. The forms had to be Mayan in their logic, not just decorative shapes that happened to catch light.

For the civic spaces, I insisted on agricultural motifs — corn specifically — and offering arrangements grounded in actual Mesoamerican practice. These details are what make Talokan feel like a real society with food systems, spiritual practices, and daily life rather than a movie set dressed to look impressive.

For the Talokan structural forms, I used heavy compacted masses and buttressing that could plausibly exist under real water pressure. I avoided glass domes and anything that read as fantasy. The city needed to look like it had been engineered by people who understood their physical environment.

For the memory room iconography specifically, I worked from actual Mayan painted wall traditions to ensure the images Shuri sees had a real visual grammar behind them, not invented symbols.

My Judgment

The hardest problem on this film wasn’t technical. It was making Talokan feel like a real civilization — one with history, agriculture, worship, grief, and daily life — rather than a visually spectacular backdrop for superhero action.

A fantasy backdrop can be built quickly from imagination. A civilization has to be researched, argued for, and protected at every stage of production. My job was to hold the line between research and construction — and to hold it consistently, even when the pressure was to move faster or simplify.