This video is sponsored by Squarespace. While the first Dune movie was being showered
with praise at the 2022 Academy Awards, director Denis Villeneuve, DP Greig
Fraser and the rest of the heads of departments were actually hard at
work - preparing to shoot the sequel. Part Two was even more ambitious. If Part One
built the world and set all the parts in place, Part Two dived straight in with an escalation in
drama and an abundance of large scale set pieces. So, let’s take a closer look at the cinematography and show how Dune achieved such bold,
ambitious, epic visual storytelling. “Whenever you do a movie you’ve got to
solve a series of problems and some of them are technical. Like, how do you get a
bit of equipment to a certain place. And then there are creative discussions. And a lot of the
technical stuff had been solved for us in advance because we’d done Part One.” This, along with the critical and financial
success of the first movie, emboldened the filmmakers and got them considering how they
could creatively and visually elevate Part Two. One of the early crossroads they arrived at
was how closely they should retain the look and feel of what they had done in the
first film, or if they should deviate to shooting a different format, use a different
palette or implement different lighting ideas. They landed on maintaining most of the look
of the original, keeping a visual continuity in the cinematic world, but elevating that look
in subtle ways, or at times by employing riskier creative decisions - like infrared black
and white - which we’ll get to a bit later. A starting point for the look
came from the camera and lens selection. Both films were designed to be
released across two, or actually three, exhibition formats. Two different, taller
aspect ratio formats for Imax cinemas, and a 2.39:1 widescreen format for
regular cinema and streaming distribution. Part One used two different types
of lenses - spherical Panavision H-series lenses to capture the taller
Imax scenes and the 1.6x anamorphic Panavision Ultra Vista lenses
for non-Imax widescreen scenes. For Part Two they kept the same large format look
of Part One which they shot on the Alexa Mini LF, while also adding an extra even
larger format Alexa 65 camera. Fraser switched up his lens selection on Part
Two - getting rid of the anamorphic lenses and shooting entirely with large format
spherical glass. Doing this meant that they would chop off the top and bottom of the
image to arrive at a widescreen aspect ratio, rather than shooting anamorphic
and getting this ratio natively. The advantage of this is that they
could then preserve the height of the frame for the taller Imax distribution
aspect ratios - having greater cropping options for all the different
distribution formats in post. When it came to choosing which spherical
lenses to shoot on there were two important factors that affected this decision.
Firstly, they had to be large format cinema lenses with enough coverage for
the LF and 65 sensors without vignetting. Secondly, Fraser sought glass that
came with a bit of vintage texture which would counteract the large format,
high res, crisp digital Alexa sensors. He landed on two different sets of lenses.
One set of Arri Rental’s rehoused version of vintage Moviecam lenses from the 1980s - with
the prime focal length lenses ranging from 16mm to 180mm - that have gentle, natural character,
a feeling of depth and beautiful focus falloff. These were combined with textural,
large format Soviet-era glass which were custom rehoused for modern use by IronGlass. Going through the film we can see that
Fraser often elected to shoot on longer focal length primes. Shooting on these
telephoto focal lengths have the effect of compressing the background and
giving images the feeling that the landscape is closer to the characters
than it would on a wide angle lens. I think this is a beautiful way of giving
the sand dunes more of a layered depth, showing the scale of the characters
within the vastness of the imposing desert and making the environment
itself feel like a character. One of the biggest reasons that I
think makes this film successful is how they melded a level of reality and
believability to a fantastical story. One of the pitfalls of many studio blockbusters
that take on stories in unrealistic, imaginative cinematic universes is that when
the visual language of the filmmaking also takes on an unrealistic tone I tend to get
pulled out of the story and lose interest. In Dune, even when fantastical,
impossible things are happening on screen, because it’s shot
in a way that is tethered to reality - I stayed fully invested with
the characters, on the edge of my seat. “When you’re shooting something so larger
than life, it’s important I think to give the audience a grounding. Because if you
then suddenly start to become unreal with a situation that’s unreal it doesn’t,
kind of, work.” - Greig Fraser, Dolby The costumes feel textural, like they’ve
been worn. The environments are authentic, and don’t look like they’ve been shot against a
green screen in a studio. When there are visual effects they feel fully integrated and a
seamless part of the live action footage. The sci-fi technology has
a mechanical believability. And, importantly, the camera is
always positioned and operated in a real way that conforms to physics.
The perspective never goes through walls, swoops around the sky or moves in
an unnecessary, unmotivated way. The shots are usually operated from the ground
and have a subtle handheld looseness to them. Or if the camera does move it’s usually
tracking the motion of characters. Always keeping the photography
grounded in reality. Well, almost always…but before we get there I’d like to thank Squarespace
for sponsoring this video. Every cinematographer and filmmaker,
even those as big as Greig Fraser, have a website. You can build
this over at Squarespace. Gone are the days where you need to
employ someone with super advanced web design skills to build a site for you.
Squarespace makes setting one up simple. It’s easy to get started with their new
guided system, Squarespace Blueprint, where you can select from custom curated
layouts and styling options to build an online presence custom tailored to your liking. Then use their optimised SEO
tools to get your portfolio seen. You can also integrate and
connect your social accounts seamlessly to further promote your
brand and get eyes onto your work. So head over to Squarespace to get
started with a free trial and when you’re ready to launch your site, go to
squarespace.com/indepthcine to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. So, part of the look relied on
keeping the cinematography grounded, however certain moments and set pieces like
the eclipse scene or the introduction of a new planet Giedi Prime introduced very
bold, stylistic photographic ideas. One concern that they had when introducing
a new planet and character to the story was that audience’s may get confused between it and
the main planet Arrakis. Giedi Prime would be introduced with an exterior scene, in a sand pit,
with a similar neutral colour palette to Arrakis. To avoid confusion Villeneuve proposed
communicating this change in location by switching to a monochromatic
palette. Fraser stylistically elevated this idea even further by
proposing black and white infrared. But what exactly is infrared? Well, cameras capture wavelengths of light.
There is visible light that our eyes can see and also light at different wavelengths
which is invisible to the naked eye. To make sure that none of these infrared light
wavelengths outside the visible spectrum bleed into the regular colour space captured by cinema
cameras - which would distort capturing realistic colours - manufacturers add an infrared filter
in front of the sensor which cuts out these rays. However, if you deliberately remove that
infrared filter in the camera and replace it with a visible light cut filter then the
camera will only capture infrared light. They did exactly this, by stripping away
the infrared filter layer from the Alexa sensor and adding a filter in front of the
lens which would cut out any excess blue, green and red visible light. This image could then be desaturated into monochrome for
on-set monitoring and post production. Infrared light isn’t exactly flattering to
actors. When shooting characters under hard, direct, toppy sunlight it gives them a frightful,
intimidating pale appearance with dark eyes - an accurate emotional representation of the
central sadistic character from this word. Overall the colour palette on Arrakis
closely follows that of the first film - leaning heavily into a neutral look with
browns, hot, white skies, greys and blacks. However, they decided to start the
opening scene with a bang by letting it unfold during an eclipse. To create
a distinct look Fraser used a filter that cut most of the green and blue
light but kept the visible red light. This pushed a darker orangey-red palette
into this scene with much denser, graduated orange skies than the regular palette. There’s a tendency in modern filmmaking to
use an abundance of soft light. If there’s harsh sun outside, most cinematographer’s first
instinct is to throw a scrim over the talent. However, part of the beauty of Dune
comes from how Fraser works with a combination of soft light and hard
light. He creates a feeling of heat by keeping the light for exteriors hard with
a crisp distinction between solid shadows and areas with highlights. Pushing the
exposure up the curve to a brighter look. When the characters are inside, he
decreases this idea of the harsh sun by lighting with a much softer, more
diffused look with a gentle gradient between shadows and highlights. He’ll weight
the exposure far darker for these scenes. Sometimes punctuating these indoor spaces
with little pockets of hard light - reminding us of the overpowering nature
of the desert sun outside. He masterfully takes a visceral feeling
and communicates it using light. If you want to incorporate film into a
movie’s workflow - you can either do so at the beginning by shooting on it, at the end
by making a film print for screening, or both. Dune did something interesting.
They decided to shoot on digital, present on digital in most cinemas, but
inserted an extra step in the middle of this process called ‘film out’. This
took the graded digital footage, laser printed it onto Kodak Vision3 5254
film then rescanned it back to digital. “We went out to film negative and then
scanned it back in. It was night and day what it gave the highlights, what it gave
the patina, what it gave the texture.” The reason for this back and forth was that they
felt that shooting on film looked too sentimental, while acquiring on digital felt too sharp,
clean and lacked the texture they wanted the world to have. By doing a film out they
got a bit of the best of both worlds. Thanks for supporting the channel and making it
possible for me to keep making this content by watching, liking or subscribing to the Patreon.
Until next time, thanks for watching and goodbye.
