By Barry Goch

Dune is a larger-than-life epic that features powerful families, or “Houses,” battling for control of the universe. The desert planet of Arrakis is at the center of this fight because it’s the only place where the natural resource “Spice” can be found. Spice is crucial for interstellar travel, so if you control the Spice, then you have the ultimate power.

Paul Lambert

The 2021 big-screen adaption of Dune, based on the Frank Herbert book, was written and directed by Denis Villeneuve (Arrival, Blade Runner 2049). postPerspective recently caught up with key members of the visual effects team to get a glimpse behind the scenes of the battle for Spice.

We spoke to the film’s overall VFX supervisor, Paul Lambert (First Man, Blade Runner 2049); DNeg Montreal VFX supervisor Brian Connor (Wonder Woman, Godzilla: King of the Monsters); and DNeg Vancouver VFX supervisor Tristan Myles (First Man, Blade Runner 2049).

Paul, how did you get on board with this project?
Paul Lambert: I had previously worked with Denis on Blade Runner 2049, and it was actually during the BAFTAs for Blade Runner — we had just won the Visual Effects BAFTA — when he told me that he was working on the script for Dune and asked me if I would be interested. We would touch base every couple of months until I got confirmed on the show with the studio.

Tristan Myles

What does the visual effect supervisor on a big movie like Dune do? What were your responsibilities?
Lambert: My job is to work with all the other heads of departments on the movie to figure out how we’re going to shoot in order to come up with the best basis for success for the visual effects in post.

I’m on the film from the very start during preproduction, and I’m one of the heads of the departments who stays with the film until the very end. The DP, production designer and special effects heads are involved in the prep, and they are there for the shoot. Sometimes the DP (in this case Greig Fraser, ACS, ASC) is there for aspects of the post, and sometimes the production designer is there for some aspects of post, but I’m there for the entire project.

Brian Connor

During preproduction, we have daily conversations as to how we’re going to shoot particular aspects of the movie, and we’ll go around the table and figure out how to do a shot. That’s when Greig [see our interview with him here] would discuss camera moves and Denis would explain what he was after. Special effects would say, “We could do this,” and then I would chime in with how we could do a shot in a particular way. On Dune we had just under six months of preproduction to try to figure out every aspect of shooting the movie.

We shot for about 115 days and were based in Budapest. We had stages, the backlot and various locations around the city. We also spent about five to six weeks in Jordan, just under two weeks in the United Arab Emirates, three or four days in Norway and a few days in California for some of the dream sequences and motion capture.

The role of the visual effects supervisor on set is to make sure that we are capturing enough footage to be able to create the visual effects in post production. For example, we captured plates so we could extend backgrounds or add more CG assets, whether it was the ornithopter or the sandworm. I was on the show for two years and four months, which is the longest I’ve ever been on a show.

During the DI and color grade in a movie, I am available if any problems come up with any of the visual effects. It happens all the time during the DI (Dune was done by Dave Cole) that something needs fixing. You can be watching a movie when suddenly a shot comes up that has an issue. And it’s not actually a visual effect shot; it’s something that got picked up! You could have watched the film a thousand times before, but until that particular moment, with three weeks to go, you see something during the DI that needs to get fixed, and VFX takes care of it.

Did you use virtual production on Dune?
Lambert: We did have one scene in which we used an LED wall. We had built a massive LED wall, and it was something for outer space, but that didn’t make it to the movie.

Brian, could you talk about your role on the film and your responsibilities.
Brian Connor: I was the supervisor for all the work that was done at DNeg Montreal. I oversaw the creative and worked with our production team to get to the level of creativity that Paul and Denis wanted us to achieve. I liaised with Paul regularly, and we would figure out the creative issues that constantly came up. I was fortunate enough to be on set and joined Paul and Tristan in Budapest for that section of the live-action shoot.

Which sequences and shots did the Montreal office work on?
Connor: The beginning of the movie, where we see House Atreides on their home planet of Caladan; the scenes where House Atreides leaves Caladan in their massive ships and head to Arrakis; and the arrival of House Atreides at the spaceport of Arrakeen — we established that world and its scope. We did all of the big opening moments, setting the tone for the movie, and created all of those assets. I like to say that we gave them to Tristan and his team, and he blew them up in a very spectacular fashion.

Tristan, can you talk about your role and responsibilities on the film?
Tristan Myles: My role was to supervise the team at DNeg Vancouver to get Paul the imagery he needed. I joined Paul on set in Jordan and Budapest as well, which was great. I spent about four months out there. I then headed back to the office, where our team was already working on the look of the sand and the scale of the absolutely massive sandworm. We did the destruction of Arrakeen as well, which Brian mentioned.

We had two super teams in effects, the largest dealing with the sand, and the other dealing with the explosions and the destruction — there were huge amounts of that. There are big ships that we have to destroy on Arrakis. And all those buildings you see in the movie — from the shield wall rolling right back to the palace — we blow it all up a bit later, with fire from the missiles just raining down and destroying a huge portion of the city. We also did the cute little desert mouse that features very briefly in the movie.

I wonder about the challenge of scale. On the one hand, you have the tiny desert mouse, and on the other hand, you have these epic battleships that are coming out of the water.
Connor: Those mouse shots were almost as difficult as our ship rising out of the water! Those ships are so huge, and what you see in the shot is just the top of the flagship coming up out of the water. The water runs down the back and cascades down the sides. The thing about water interactions is that we usually break things up into smaller pieces to make them more manageable.

How does that scale affect the workflow?
Connor: When you have a simulation, one part of it affects the other, and they can’t be mutually exclusive. This means you have to come up with different ways to distribute the computation of these things. We would render the simulation over a weekend when no one was around so we could get the full power of the DNeg render farm without interrupting or slowing things down for all the other shows that were going on.

Then there’s the disk space that’s required for those kinds of simulations. The requirements are huge because it has to store all of the data that is calculated in order to have a history of the simulation and to ramp it up to the place that you cut to in your shots.

Can you talk about the sandworms?
Myles: The sandworm is huge. It took months, on and off, to wrangle this creature, to build it, to model it and to sculpt it in into shape. And then the teeth! We borrowed from the idea of the baleen layer that certain whales have in their mouths, which filters the krill and all sorts of other things from the ocean. These teeth had to be able to bend and flex so they didn’t just snap off when the worm is eating things like harvesters. It also allows them to roll back into the mouth so that when the mouth closes as the worm is moving through the sand, it doesn’t spike itself.

To get that to work there, we had to model different versions of these teeth and then use a scattering system in the software Houdini to get them to populate the worm’s mouth at render time so we could get it through. We had to break the teeth sections into different chunks to be able to render different parts to them and bring it all together in the composite to get the final image. Certainly a big challenge. We got quite a few emails from the tech teams warning that we’re filling up the disks — a technical battle at the other end of the scale.

Let’s talk about the mouse. The connection Paul Atreides has with this tiny creature shows that the mouse can survive in the desert. I had no idea that the mouse was CG! 
Myles: There are very few shots of the mouse in the film, so we thought it would be straightforward, but then we got into it.

The plates were shot in Jordan. There was a stuffed version of the mouse that they put on a stick and moved in the scene, so we had a great lighting reference for the time of day — very early morning — to base the lighting on. The first stage we got into was building this creature to match it to the stuffy.

The mouse is based on a real-life desert mouse, the jerboa, and it’s an amalgamation of about three different types of mice. I think the long tails of the kangaroo mouse, legs, and those big ears are what the team had to get, first working with all the turntables and the fur. Getting that fur to work was interesting because, although it’s a small creature, this was an IMAX shot that is above full-frame height. It’s a head and shoulders, and we had it filling the frame at one point. We had to make sure our fur system held up to that. It took about a month on and off to get that right.

Then you have the water component, which was trickier than I thought it would be. The water droplets gather in the mouse’s ears at the top of the dune, and the water condenses, running down its ear and interacting with the fur at the same time. So you have that push and pull between effects. And the subsurface transparency of the ear added another layer of complexity to all of that. Then the animation team responsible for making the mouse scoop the water into its mouth had to go back to the creature FX team to get the whiskers to move properly with the hand across the fur on its face throughout the scene. It was a lot of work. It took a lot of hours to get that to work.

The final bit was making sure that the render holds up so there was no buzzing or noise like you sometimes get with CG. So, yeah, the guys put a hell of a lot into that.

DP Greig Fraser with the ARRI on set

Paul, can you talk about the challenge of making a film for IMAX and the creative choices that you make because of the format?
Lambert: For the IMAX version, we shot with the ARRI Alexa LF, and we shot different sequences two different ways — one with fully open gate lenses, which gave us the full IMAX 4:3 aspect ratio, and another with 1.65 anamorphic lenses, which then gave us the 2.39 aspect ratio. Greig and Denis [see our interview with him here) had come up with this idea that any exteriors would be full IMAX and anything inside would be 2.39.

At the beginning of the movie, they wanted the camera movement to be more constrained. During the Caladan sequences, the camera was on sticks or tracks, but once we go out into the desert, it becomes more hand-held. We framed for 4:3 IMAX and thought that a 2.39 extraction would be fine for post. But what we found was that there are about 29 shorts, so we had to extend the IMAX frame out because we could not make a 2.39 cutout from that. We had this massive IMAX frame, and the guys had to extend the sides out of the IMAX frame.

We delivered 7K to the DI, which was then squished down to 2.39. There is one particular shot with the worm and Paul Atreides  (Timothée Chalamet) — Denis wanted the worm to fill the frame and have Paul at the bottom. Then, basically, the worm rises up, and you get to see the mouth. Those are actually two different shots that had to be reframed and reimagined from the IMAX version for the 2.39 version because you just couldn’t fit it in.

Was that a conscious choice during preproduction that you were going to frame and shoot certain sequences in IMAX?
Lambert: Yes. There were early conversations between Denis and Greig — Denis had envisaged the movie in a square format, and that caught Greig by surprise. We did camera tests before preproduction. There is a progression of the frame from the more controlled Caladan setup to the wider, bigger expanse of Paul in the desert and immersed in the world of the Fremen. That was very much a conscious choice.

Before I let you guys go, what advice would you give to someone interested in starting a career in VFX?
Connor:  It’s not a lifestyle for everybody. A lot of it depends on what part of visual effects you do. It can be a very nomadic life, moving to where the tax incentives and the work are. So for people who enjoy traveling, this could be a nice career. The hours are somewhat nontraditional as well. You have to be OK with dedicating your time to finishing the show, and that can affect you if you have a family.

Also, maybe try different parts of the visual effects process and see which one you like. Find what you naturally enjoy and seek it out. The three of us — Paul, Tristan and I — were compositors, and that has really helped us in our careers in terms of being able to see what the issues are and why the pieces are working or not working together.

What about you, Tristan?
Myles: Pick a discipline that you are interested in and focus on just that when you’re putting a reel together. You want to put your best foot forward. Don’t try to fill out your reel to make it three minutes long. Keep your reel short, but be sure to put your best pieces in there. Don’t try to do everything because you can’t. There is such a vast spectrum of disciplines. Decide on the discipline that you like, and get that reel out there now. Right now is a really good time to get into visual effects. I think there’s more work out there than there are artists.

Paul, anything you would like to pass along?
Lambert: You have to enjoy what you’re doing in this job, otherwise the hours will be a problem. It’s not just a 9-to-5 job; it’s definitely deadline-driven just like any other deadline-based industry.

Also, visual effects is a visual art — if you draw, if you take pictures, understand what you’re doing with the picture from the lighting perspective. It just basically encompasses the world. Walk around your home or outside, and as you’re looking about, try to figure out how you would recreate things. I’m forever walking outside, and when I see a sunset or a house or something, I think, “Well, I’m going to kick that back because it doesn’t look real!” I am always doing that, always saying it’s not real enough! (laughs).

Every project is different. That’s also what keeps it interesting. It’s never the same thing over and over again.

Images Courtesy of DNEG © 2021 Legendary and Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Barry Goch is a senior editor at ColorTime in North Hollywood. He also teaches post production at UCLA Extension. He can be reached at barry@colortime2020.com.