They call it “Beautiful sand.” Outside the deserts of Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, where director Denis Villeneuve fired multiple shots Dulu, all are beige shades. By comparing this, viewing moderator Paul Lambert did something he had never done before: he changed his appearance to a green one. Sandscreen means Villeneuve can take out all its bullets in the desert and Lambert can add anything he wants to make. All they had to do was change the color of the sand into a house, a base, or any other animal that they wanted. It allowed every shot to look as natural as possible — and allowed them to create one of the most recognizable sci-fi features.
We’re talking about sandworms, of course. As told by Frank Herbert in Dulu, aquatic caterpillars are the largest living creatures in the vast sands of Arrakis and emit “spices” – the most valuable substance in the universe. For Fremen, descendants of Arrakis, they also serve as transportation. Fremen also connect outside and represent them as they walk through the desert. Sandscreen means that Lambert is able to paint an artist on a “climbing” sandworm – especially a platform on a moving gimbal covered in beige – and then add a worm underneath it with a CGI. It gave Lambert the ability to make a seamless shot for VFX (there were over 2,000 available. Dulu), and Villeneuve the ability to have a video that looks as natural as possible. “I’m not a supervisor who can say to Denis, ‘Look, if we just make a blue curtain…’ ‘Lambert says.” I don’t work that way. “
Making worms itself was another job. Villeneuve began to work Dulu just finished Blade Runner 2049 in 2017. “I wanted more time, and [the studio] gave me time, ”says Villeneuve. “We started planning, everything was already done, the technical skills were done.” Working with designer Patrice Vermette, he spent several months trying to create the right kind of worm – its size, shape, the strength it would need to go through the sand.
“Obviously, there are a lot of enthusiasts Dulu that if you go online-Google, if, ‘Dulu sandworm ‘- there are many different translations, ”says Vermette. “And Dulu has been a great inspiration to many lovers of science fiction and animated films. In Star Wars there is shiny sand. As a result, we want to do something original, and risky. ”
The design of the worms he developed was what Lambert calls “history.” It is gnarly and covered in scales and looks like hundreds of feet in length. One of the best examples was the fish. The large sand dunes, which Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) encounters, are filled with baleen; its movement on the ground should be very smooth. Lambert’s team used all these ideas to build worms digitally, and to shape their form Clarisse, and entertain them using Maya, then I make every shot Nuke.
Then there was the story of the worm’s name: sand. The creatures earn less money Dulu, but they are often seen walking on the ground. Corruption on the piles, which Herbert called “remove, ”It also had to be made up of numbers. While in the desert, Lambert wanted to know how to spot a worm moving sand that could cause landmines, “but in the Middle East it’s probably not a good thing to do.” Instead, he made a comparison of moving sand using Houdini program, based primarily on water flow.
Which brings us to another unique thing about sand dunes: the obvious results. In addition to shaking the ground, Fremen in the Desakis wilderness – and the audience in the video – should feel the movement of the worms. Sand larvae also follow subterranean noise, almost like sonar (again: whales), which is why Fremen disrupt organisms by using “thumpers” that hit the ground regularly. This means DuluThe Eagles had to have their own sound-work that fell on the band of Mark Mangini and Theo Green. The two have worked with Villeneuve Blade Runner 2049 and thus he came up with a wisdom that lasted until Dulu“All these noises should feel as if they were living in the environment we know,” says Mangini. Villeneuve “was a great fan of everything we heard that was natural or logical.”
To do this, he came up with another idea: a false positives, or FDR for short. The idea was where Dulu it needs to sound like a document written by a team sent to Arrakis. No more “good-y-drawing,” says Green. So to the sand worms, the two rejected the beast’s film claims and coined the term “swarm” of worms — a symbol of distant danger. He took a submarine microphone to Death Valley and recorded the sound of moving sand. Upon hearing the worm’s mouth, he coined the term “gunk-gunk-gunk” to record the sounds of humans and animals. (The two are hesitant to give examples. “I don’t think there was anything out of the ordinary,” says Mangini. The noise it makes when it swallows a whole spice harvesting machine? That’s Mangini with a mic in her mouth sucking a lot of air.
The result is something that is a little more complex, like the same Arrakis. It is also very different from most sci-fi movies. “The thing I’ve seen about Denis is that he never gave me anything from another film to explain,” Green says. “They use other videos as examples of what you shouldn’t do,” adds Mangini. Thus, wolves are no different from any of the other animals in the film. Out of fear, Villeneuve wanted people to respect the worms when they appeared in the window, telling Mangini that he was “a god greater than Godzilla.”
Some of the Best WIRED Stories