In Frank Herbert’s “Dune” novel, the first attempt on Paul Atreides’ life comes when the Duke of House Atreides is alone in his room after he and his family take up residence on the planet Arrakis. In the book, Herbert describes a moment where a Hunter Seeker drone, sent by the nefarious House Harkonnen, enters his room, writing:
“From behind the headboard slipped a tiny hunter-seeker no more than five centimetres long. Paul recognised it at once — a common assassination weapon that every child of royal blood learned about at an early age. It was a ravening sliver of metal guided by some near-by hand and eye. It could burrow into moving flesh and chew its way up nerve channels to the nearest vital organ.”
As the scene goes on, Paul has to remain completely still so as to not give away his location to the drone operator, who is seeing the Hunter Seeker’s field of view through a “compressed suspensor field” which “distort(s) the vision of its transmitter eye.” As Paul holds himself “in near catatonic immobility,” the door to his room opens and the Hunter Seeker darts towards it, just as Paul reaches out and snatches it from the air.
Though there are a lot of things wrong with 1984’s “Dune,” this scene is depicted fairly faithfully in David Lynch’s much maligned epic, with Kyle MacLachlan’s Paul Atreides having to remain perfectly still while a version of the Hunter Seeker that basically looks like a fancy syringe searches the room. But for Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 version, the filmmaker and his crew added an extra level of visual flair to the scene, which called for some VFX ingenuity from Paul Lambert and his own team.
#Dunes #VFX #Team #Create #Technique #Hologram #Scenes #SlashFilm
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