Welcome to the Dune Special Edition Project

This is a project I have been slowly working on over the last few years with the goal of ultimately replacing many of the "outdated" special effects shots in David Lynch's 1984 version of Dune.
The project initially began as an endeavor to build a "proper" ornithopter - one with flapping wings, that neither the movie or the mini-series managed to achieve. However, with the advent of the "fan-edit" the scope of the project has expanded with the goal of updating the effects in all those places in the movie where I feel things could be significantly "improved."
Although I am currently working on this by Myself, it's a large undertaking and if there is anyone interested in helping this project along, feel free to contact Me - We might actually be able to get this project completed with a few more skilled and enthusiastic people!

Regards
Sasha Burrow

If you are curious about My professional work, I have been working as a VFX artist (Among other things) at The Asylum for the past 6 years, including visual effects on all 4 Sharknado films (Mainly stuff blowing up!).
CLICK THE LINK TO SEE MY CURRENT SHOW-REEL

DUNE Special Edition: Showreel March 2010

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Castle Caladan







(Click previews for larger image)
For the introduction to the planet Caladan in the movie, it starts with a really awesome panning shot of enormous waves crashing against a rugged coastline, before cutting to a really awful model cliff side and totally out of scale waves, before cutting again to show the Castle where the Duke and his family reside.
My vision here, using modern digital compositing techniques, will be to extend the first panning shot, so it continues up the ragged cliffs until the castle is revealed at the top... possibly having the camera close in on the window where paul is sitting, then cutting back tot he interior shot that starts at the window with the rain outside and pans over to see Paul at his desk.
I've included an image of the model, a mock up of what I sort of want it to look lik, a render of the model and a render of the planet Caladan.

2 comments:

  1. I really hope you don't entirely do Castle Caladan with special effects. Use a real-life image as a base of sorts, otherwise the entire thing will look bad. The water and rain is okay since they'll be moving quickly and be rather dark, so no one will notice.

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  2. This might be the best place to point it out, but I wanted to mention the updated "Secret report within the Guild" shot.

    The text beneath each planet is a bit crowded and overdone. The "planet" text is redundant, since I'm sure the viewer can figure out what they're looking at are planets. I'd just remove those and leave the rest.

    The visuals themselves are good, but very static. It feels like a simple test. Each planet should have at least a slight rotation animation. This isn't too big a deal, but it becomes very apparent when we zoom onto Kaitain. The atmospheric-clouds, complemented by the lack of a rotation, just makes it very obvious that this is all special effects. If it's not too much trouble, I think it would vastly improve the sequence if you added a slight rotation to each planet so we feel more drawn into this universe.

    Hope these comments help.

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