Echo: Breaking Barriers

Definition

The antihero of MCU series Echo is Maya Lopez (played by Alaqua Cox), a deaf Cheyenne-Latin American warrior, which gives the show several forms of inclusion to navigate. There’s the indigenous narrative background, a matriarchal society story arc and differently abled characters to integrate into the action.

article here   p18-19 March issue 2024

Cox is a deaf actress and Echo is the second deaf hero (introduced in Hawkeye) to join the MCU (Lauren Ridloff starred as Makkari in Eternals). The filmmakers built on this experience to employ a variety of strategies to represent the character and ensure communication between cast and crew.

Consulting producer and American Sign Language (ASL) master Doug Ridloff worked on both the Eternals and Hawkeye sets, working with the production team long before cameras rolled.

The process of translating the sign language into film grammar so that it feels second nature to the viewer required a fair amount of trial and error, explains Kira Denise Kelly ASC.

“One of the first camera tests I shot threw up the question ‘what is a close-up when you are framing to include ASL?’ Conventionally, we’d shoot a close-up of somebody’s face to capture their emotion and to immerse the audience closer to your story. But we couldn’t do that here.”

Many scenes feature no spoken dialogue which both DP and director were initially concerned about. How could they sustain a lengthy conversation between multiple characters who don't speak?

Framing a close-up on hands or face would exclude Cox’s dialogue. “What we found is that if you start a shot on somebody's hands and then tilt up to their faces while they're signing, that's an incomplete sentence,” says Kelly who took ASL lessons to prepare. “It's not a full phrase if you will. So we definitely needed some space in the frame but still get close enough to capture emotion.”

With director Sydney Freeland, Kelly built the show’s visual language with the idea that hands are the text, and the face is the subtext, and that the audience need both together to understand what a person is feeling.

Flashbacks depict Lopez as a child (Darnell Besaw) and other scenes feature her cousin Bonnie (Devery Jacobs) both also using ASL fluently and frequently. In the story, Maya’s hearing family members use ASL as a way of keeping her part of the conversation.

“It’s Maya’s show but we never wanted to differentiate her coverage being in wides and everybody else’s in more traditional close-ups.”

They settled on more of a “medium close” to retain the full vocabulary and played with different longer lenses to achieve an emotional sweet spot.

She elected to shoot on the Alexa Mini LF for its ability to use a full-frame sensor and capture skin tones. For lenses, the personalised Panavision T series curated by Dan Sasaki was vital in creating a unique look for the show.

“I consider I’ve done a job well if you turn the sound off and the audience knows what the story is. Moving pictures should have their own language and should be able to communicate a story without the support of dialogue. This series gave me the chance to really play with that by really leaning into how to tell that story with the visuals.”

Kelly is a two-time Emmy-nominated DP, for Ava DuVernay’s Netflix documentary 13th (2017) and an episode of HBO’s Insecure in 2020, the year she made history as the first Black woman invited into the prestigious American Society of Cinematographers.

She shot the pilot FX series Y The Last Man, based on a graphic novel, and additional photography for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings but it was her relationship with Freeland, on upcoming Netflix feature Rez Ball (a sports drama set about Native American basketball players) which led to Echo. She is the lead DP on the four Freeland directed episodes with Magdalena Gorka photographing episode 3 directed by Catriona McKenzie.

Cox is also an amputee in real life and uses a prosthetic leg on her right side, a disability embraced by the production particularly in fight scenes.

Stunt coordinator Mark Scizak incorporated the fact that Cox can do bigger blocks with her prosthetic leg since she wouldn’t feel pain there. She also used it as leverage, holding her leg back to get as much power out of her kicks as possible.

The third element of inclusion is setting the story roots in the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. Many cast and crew are native American origin including Cox (Menominee Nation) and Freeland (Navajo). Scenes set in rural Oklahoma were shot mainly on stages and locations in Atlanta, where the main challenge was working around the greenery of Georgia state to match the drier landscape of the plains.

“The show flashes from each generation of the Choctaw tribe that has led Maya to inherit ancestral powers,” Kelly says. “Each flashback was captured with a new look to differentiate between ancestors. The beginnings of the Choctaw tribe in Oklahoma has an old Western feel in black and white, while the present day is rooted in realism, open spaces, a richer palette and an emphasis on saturated colours.”

The opening moment of the show, dubbed the Dawn of Time, was the first time that the Choctaw story of creation had been depicted on screen.  Kelly calls it an honour to do but felt pressure to recreate it authentically under guidance of Choctaw representatives. “We spent weeks looking at examples of glow worms in Australia and different cave dwellings to figure out what the core of the Earth looks like. It’s not otherworldly because it’s the story of how the world began, but we wanted to make it feel like you’re in the centre of the core of the earth and these people have emerged and suddenly become human.”

For a Choctaw game of stickball game in ep.2 she deployed spherical H series lenses from Panavision using the widest ones that enabled them to made the camera feel like it was part of that game. “We put it in the middle and had people run toward it and it was a really dynamic way to get the camera involved."

Kelly was able to see and experience a powwow first-hand before filming a similar scene for ep.5. “For me, it’s the most emotional scene because while powwows have been shown on film before there was something special about being ground-level cameras inside of it and doing it at night..."