The Dune Movies But Without Special Effects

Believability is the watchword for the Denis Villeneuve "Dune" movies, and yet, they're science-fiction movies set millennia from now. The production didn't escape the use of computer-generated (CG) visual effects (VFX), but it did escape making its actors and environments look like cut-outs against a clearly-keyed-in bluescreen. So how did the production avoid the typical superhero movie trap, and instead make the "Dune" movies look like National Geographic went to space in the year 10,000?

The answer is sand. Or, more accurately, sand-colored screens that stretch as wide as football fields. These sandscreens worked as a bluescreen that matched the color of the desert daylight filmmakers were after, and also helped them extend and manipulate practical sets, environments, characters, and the like digitally. "We found that when you put the sandscreen in the negative, it becomes blue. So it's an inverted blue screen," Villeneuve explained in a making-of interview.

Watch for the sandscreens you can't see in the finished film of "Dune: Part One" — especially the scene when the Atreides family first lands on Arrakis, and when Paul walks the Palace at Arrakeen grounds to observe the sacred palm trees. In the landing scene, sandscreens are used to extend the environment beyond the landed ship. In the palm tree scene, sandscreens stand in for the palace in the background.

Patrice Vermette served as the production designer for "Dune: Part One" and "Dune: Part Two." He worked in partnership with multiple departments, practically and digitally, to pull off an entire galaxy with a big — but tight — budget. The name of the game was immersion, and Vermette helped create as much practical magic as possible via collaboration, creativity, and materials you might not expect.

"Patrice Vermette had to be very, very creative with space. The sets were like Transformers," Denis Villeneuve explained in making-of footage. For example, in "Dune: Part One," Duke Leto's (Oscar Isaac) room doubles as Duncan Idaho's (Jason Momoa) room. After the space was dressed for each character's parts, lights and VFX were added to bring the scenes to life — and block out the wood scaffolding behind the sets. "We went old-school Hollywood," Vermette told Elle Decor. And of Villeneuve's immersive approach, he added, "I think it helps everyone on the team get into the mood of what we're doing."

Vermette and his team also used interesting materials to create ceilings for CG artists to better manipulate in post. During the lab scene, the spoked ceiling is made of fabric, which allows teams to better manipulate texture effects and actors to be lit naturally from sunlight above. Vermette also explained to Elle Decor that filming on the soundstages in Budapest had its difficulties. "The challenge was it was the rainy season," he revealed. In addition to rain wetting the shoot's considerable sand, he added, "There was the wind factor ... our fabric ceiling had to be super tight."

The ornithopters of the "Dune" movies are a far cry from rear-projected car scenes of yore — but much like driving scenes in sitcoms or any movie, ornithopter flights had to contend with the ships covering a lot of ground and moving through naturally shifting desert light. Whether they were used to survey the spice mines of Arrakis or being flown in a fight for their pilot's lives, designers and animators worked creatively to make ornithopters look as fully functioning as they felt for the actors.

This was achieved by really filming interior ornithopter scenes outside. Paul Lambert told Befores and Afters: "We went out and scouted and found the highest hill in Budapest, and we built our gimbal on top of this hill so we could get a nice flat horizon, and then around the gimbal we constructed a 25 foot high, sand-colored, 360-degree ramp. What we called it was the 'dog collar,' which circled the entire gimbal."

Sun would reflect off the "dog collar" and fill the ornithopter interior with perfect, natural desert light. Director of photography Greig Fraser could capture his scenes lit this way, and his shots would later be composited with separately filmed plates (think: long clips) of real-life flight footage. When Fraser focused on actors in the ship and left the background just out-of-focus, Lambert said, "It almost looked as if you were over the desert."

Stellan Skarsgård plays baddie Baron Vladimir Harkonnen in the "Dune" films. The Baron's size is often described in Frank Herbert's books, and Skarsgård fittingly plays his part in a prosthetic suit that's larger than life. It makes him look part sandworm and is augmented with enough hardware to drive Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) from "Mad Max: Fury Road" more mad with envy.

Skarsgård sat in the makeup chair for hours getting prosthetics and makeup applied — but he didn't have too many complaints. "I mean, you go into a sort of fatalistic Zen. But ... I also enjoyed the people working on me," he explained to GQ. "They were a crew of five, and they were very funny, and lovely ... The painting work they did — it was like watching Michelangelo work."

Head makeup designer (and long-time Denis Villeneuve collaborator) Donald Mowat cautioned Villeneuve against wading into bad comedy territory with the suit. "You also need to be respectful, you're not fat-shaming other people," Mowat explained to The Italian Rêve, adding, "It's okay to be fat and we were very careful about that, so I said to [Villeneuve], "Let's try." Eventually, Mowat, Villeneuve, and the combined efforts of their teams led to a design that made it into the movies — and, in the case of "Dune: Part Two" — into a disgusting black oil bath. Skarsgård insisted to GQ: "It was perfectly temperate. It was warm. It was nice." We'll just have to take the Baron's word for it.

Paul Atreides has to hide out to evade attack during "Dune: Part One," and the best place for him to momentarily escape is a holographic creosote tree projected by his filmbook. It's a gorgeous and scary scene that looks too real to be CGI and too mystical to be fully real — because the effect is really achieved with a wide variety of practical, digital, and in-camera magic.

Paul Lambert and his team knew they couldn't create a full-out hologram for their shoot, but needed to find a way to get some of the hologram's light onto Timothée Chalamet. The team experimented, then ended up getting Denis Villeneuve to approve a design for the tree very early in pre-production. Then they fragmented that image into hundreds of slides.

Lambert told Digital Trends: "We then got an old-fashioned projector and projected each slice on him, based on where he was on the set. So as Paul moved, you would get a different slice being projected on him and around him. And as he moved forward, you would get one slice after another, as if he was moving through the branches." Post-production teams were able to add in and animate the rest of the tree after the fact, using the light Chalamet really did physically interact with as the base of this hauntingly beautiful scene.

Maybe even more frightening than sandworms slithering through the dunes is the moment one opens its mouth and sucks in anyone or anything unlucky (and loud) enough to have summoned it. Animators and filmmakers looked to the mouths of whales to create their CGI models — and took cues from how baleen traps its tasty little morsels.

Robyn Luckham and his animators worked with a variety of teams to create hundreds of muscle animations for each circular baleen tooth the sandworm has and worked on appropriately animating the beast's throat. "We studied footage of the inside of a 'beat-boxers' larynx on how the throat would be affected by sound," Luckham told Art of VFX. This allowed for creative sound design, especially for the "Dune: Part One" scene where a sandworm sucks down a spice crawler.

Sound department genius Mark Mangini stuck a microphone down his own throat and "sucked for as long as I had lung power for," he told Vanity Fair. "Sometimes, there are simple solutions to complex problems." Paul Lambert's team also figured out how to make it look like actors were sinking into the sand when a sandworm got close. As he explained to Befores & Afters, they actually sank them, using a large remote-controlled plate buried in the sand that would shake actors and lower them as needed.

How slow is your blade? The shimmering body shields worn by the characters of the "Dune" movies look just as photorealistic as the interactive light blended with animated light in the holograph tree scene, but they are actually animated entirely in post — with a lot of playing around in pre-production to find the right technique.

Animators played with effects using a clip from "Seven Samurai" before shooting began. "One of my artists processed an image from the film to blend past and future frames together," Paul Lambert told Digital Trends. "I then had the artist go in and paint back the original frames a bit or paint in some of the effect, because I wanted it to feel more analog."

Using the color blue to show the shield had provided protection (because a move was too fast) and red for damage (from a slow enough blade, as it were) was an innovation made for the films, deep into the post process. "You couldn't really work out what was going on because of the intensity of the fighting, and that's where the idea of the color came in," Lambert said in a DNEG featurette. This effect is best on display in the training scene between Gurney (Josh Brolin) and Paul in the first film.

While the "Dune" films are wonders of VFX and special effects, perhaps why they are so visually stunning is they incorporate as much of the real world and practical effects as they possibly can.

Even the long-awaited kiss between Paul and Chani in "Dune: Part Two" depended less on CG than a real-life Unesco World Heritage site. Zendaya was amazed at the locations the productions got to shoot in, including the Wadi Rum desert of Jordan. She was overcome with emotion describing the scene to Florence Pugh at IGN FanFest, saying: "It's the big Paul and Chani kiss, and it's like, sweeping, and that is just practical ... I remember being on the day, like, whoa – this is real."

Other shooting locations for the "Dune" films include Norway, Italy, and Budapest. In addition to shooting in real locations and showcasing natural landscapes, the "Dune" films also used a lot — and we mean a lot — of sand. "We were forever blowing sand around," Paul Lambert told Befores & Afters. "The SFX team actually used 18 tons of dust/sand during the production." Fear might be the mind-killer, but sand is a close second.