DUNE: PART TWO PRODUCTION
MAKING HAY Shooting on the sand dunes of Jordan required careful planning to get the most out of limited time, including use of Unreal Engine to determine sun positioning
Two since lenses needed protection from the elements. The crew opted for ND filters in front of their glass, since the ALEXA 65 doesn’t have in-built NDs. After testing a selection of top-quality filters, they opted for Formatt Hitech Firecrests, which Fraser describes as working great. “I love the worm run,” states Fraser, reflecting on his favourite moments from the finished feature. “I love the harvester attack too, but also love the characterisation between Chani and Paul. It’s an intimate story, but at the same time it’s big, bold, grand and incredibly exciting.” On top of basking in the critical and box-office response, another good thing about the film being out in the wild is having the press embargo lifted. This came as a huge relief, according to Fraser. “I remembered that we finished the shoot down in Namibia with – spoiler alert obviously – Anya Taylor-Joy and we couldn’t tell a soul. I was talking to friends of mine who had worked on Furiosa not long after that and wanted to say ‘Anya is lovely and had a great time’. I couldn’t do it, I was having to keep the secret. Now I can tell the world!”
DUNE: PART ONE WAS PAUL before Arrakis . IT WAS interior, WHILE THE IMAX WAS exterior ”
On the glass front, spherical lenses were favoured over anamorphic. “Part of the change between films is that Part One was Paul before Arrakis; Paul before he sets foot in the environment, which had an anamorphic feel. It was interior, while the IMAX was exterior. Spherical opened up his world into an IMAX frame. “We worked from a focal range around 40mm to 135mm, and made use of Moviecams and DNAs out of ARRI, as well as Iron Glass rehoused optics – the Helios and Jupiter lenses – in 37, 58 and 85mm. We employed a few long lenses from Canon, too.” LEDs were heavily relied upon, especially Creamsource Vortexes, plus
lights from Aputure and Digital Sputnik. “We have been talking to Creamsource about joining their Vortexes together for ages and I wanted a smart way to do it,” reveals Fraser. “They had indicated they were working on something – or were thinking about it – and I said ‘speed it up, send it to us and we’ll test it for you’. “They sent us a prototype of the LNX System and it’s used to join all of the fixtures together,” he continues. “The first one we built was a 64-Vortex rig called the Vortex 512, because it had 512 pixels. It was quite fantastic as a big, powerful, punchy LED source.” Also crucial was the filtration system, which took on a new importance in Part
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