In 2019, the 3rd season of Noah Hawley’s LEGION promised to not only deliver on several giant X-Men comics-related plot points (Professor X! David’s mom! A final showdown with the Shadow King!) it would also be the show’s final season.
Plus it was gonna be psychedelic as hell.
Strange Tales #146 (July 1966) Pencils by Steve Ditko
Sure, most major TV shows returning for a final season risk the kind of that ol’ marketing conundrum where a network wants to please fans and hopefully pull in new viewers - but the nature of LEGION made this approach inherently different.
“The recognizable cast, the psychedelia and surreal comic-book pulp; it’s beautiful situation to be in creatively.”
Season 2’s custom shoot “MORPH” had set the technical standard and stacked the weirdness scale high. It’s still one of the most amazing :30 seconds I’ve ever been part of.
S3 BRIEF
Noah Hawley’s vision for S3 was fairly different from the previous two, with a heavy influence from 60’s flower-power and a more modern (but no less vibrant) K-Pop aesthetic. More importantly, the show’s ties to its source material would be front and center.
So with that came license to draw upon some of the more phantasmagoric imagery from my 30 years as a comic addict—not just from the original Bill Stankiewicz designs of the character but from the incredible artists who contributed to the Simon Spurrier X-Men: Legacy run in 2012 (especially Jorge Molina and Tan Eng Haut.)
And of course, you can’t have this sort of conversation without mentioning Steve Ditko.
CUSTOM SHOOT
Central to the launch would be a :30 Custom that would pack in more easter eggs and references than a fan could possibly notice in a single view.
It would also act as a recap of sorts that would theoretically move as if in a single take. Each of the character’s actions needed to imply key events from the previous seasons, which ended up being much harder than I expected. The show’s (a little convoluted) story could be ambiguous at times, so narrowing it down to 15 seconds worth of movement was a real exercise.
In total I produced 9 storyboard variants before the final was approved.
The last storyboard was drawn by Brien White, a vfx artist and illustrator that constantly amazed everyone with his output - even if thats as far as we got, to see something this ambitious go that far was worth every bit of angst. I’ve got a print framed in my living room.
The final is a wonder to behold, despite the various hiccups in VFX that I was only exposed to from a distance.
The track that was approved ended up being the song QUARTZ by TV On The Radio. It was just trippy and modern-sounding enough to work.
The final (and a dozen iterations) was assembled by the great Colman Connelly, one of the best editors in the biz and one of the best I’ve ever worked with, seriously. He was the force behind the CULT DADDY DAVID clip spot you can see below, which maaaaay be my favorite from the campaign.
CLIP SPOT CAMPAIGN
I was also put in charge of clip spots , a number of which were edited by Shannon Zensen.
By then I had developed a producing style that favored skip-cutting and single frames to really pile on the idea that a ton of crazy stuff happens.
Obviously this show lends itself to that. Very well.
I’m a big fan of over-arching VO directly from a character that allows the show to “do the talking for you.” Colman and Shannon’s style compliment that perfectly and we ended up with several amazing mini-movies that actually aired on the big screen before SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING