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Dune’s Biggest VFX Challenge Wasn’t the Worms But the Sand

Published

2 years ago

January 17, 2022

Dune's Biggest VFX Challenge Wasn't the Worms But the Sand

This story in regards to the making of Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” first appeared within the Under-the-Line situation of TheWrap’s awards journal.

The sandworms get all of the love and a spotlight, however if you happen to ask “Dune’s” visible results supervisor, Paul Lambert, it was the sand across the worms that proved to be probably the most difficult to create.

When it got here to designing these monstrous, iconic sandworms, the excellent news for the VFX staff is that Denis Villeneuve knew precisely what he wished. These had been easy, slow-moving, ageless beasts—hulking beings with inflexible plates all alongside their our bodies, revealing small pockets of flesh because the creatures develop and contract like an accordion as they transfer beneath the desert floor, catching every thing of their paths like a whale sweeping the ocean waters for krill.

None of that, although, was the actual downside for the staff. Actually, preliminary visual-effects designs for the worms had an excessive amount of character and benefitted from being simplified. However Villeneuve had one other particular request, and Lambert and his staff had no real-world, bodily reference on which to base it.

“Denis wished the dunes to break down and lift as this factor was transferring,” he stated. “One factor for visible results, if you happen to’re in a position to get a bodily reference of one thing and replica that, they’re much more plausible. We scoured the web to seek out an ideal disturbance within the sand, and we simply couldn’t discover it.”

Failing that, Lambert even requested the “Dune” manufacturing staff if they might place explosives inside dunes and see what occurs, solely to be rapidly reminded that they had been filming within the Center East. Not an ideal concept.

“In order that didn’t occur,” he stated. “Realizing that disturbing this quantity of sand was going to be problematic, we began doing check simulations as quickly as I joined the venture.”

Lambert’s staff would simulate each grain of sand to see how it will cascade or explode off the behemoth’s physique or how dunes themselves would ripple. And thru meticulous trial and error, they might appropriate for the worm’s scale, make minuscule tweaks to make sure the timing of the sand’s motion was appropriate and do every thing doable to cluster sand into larger particles and nonetheless ensure it seemed plausible.

However all that work and a spotlight to element didn’t simply start in -production course of. Lambert labored carefully early on with manufacturing designer Patrice Vermette and cinematographer Greig Fraser to create particular setups and lighting environments wherein the digital world and visible results could be an extension of what was already constructed.

“Realizing upfront precisely what the background is helps you propose the shoot,” Lambert stated. “It could by no means be the case the place we put somebody right into a blue field and determine it out later. We at all times had an understanding of what the background could be.”

Lambert constructed what he referred to as a 25-foot-high “canine collar,” a sand-colored ramp extending round a few of the movie’s constructions. The backdrop helped immerse the actors in a desert world and allowed Lambert to mix the backgrounds and retain a lot of the supply pictures.

“We had been constructing a blue display, however no person realized, as a result of it was all sand-colored,” he stated. “Visible results proper now’s at some extent the place if you happen to give me a bit of footage, I can exchange the background with something you need. But when what’s within the foreground doesn’t have the lighting for the intention within the background, there isn’t a lot I can do about it.”