One of the most stunning sequences in Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi spectacle “Dune: Part Two” wasn’t achieved through visual effects, but by a mere camera trick. Albeit one that Oscar-winning cinematographer Greig Fraser had been toying with for years.
While the majority of the franchise takes place on the desert planet Arrakis, “Dune: Part Two” makes a detour to the home planet of House Harkonnen to introduce Austin Butler’s twisted villain Feyd-Rautha in a violent, striking arena fight. Right off the bat, everything looks alien – the color is washed out, and the black-and-white visuals are deep and disturbing. Fraser, who won an Oscar for his work on the first “Dune,” achieved the unique look by using infrared technology – something he put to striking use on “Zero Dark Thirty” and the “Star Wars” prequel “Rogue One.”
“The decision came about because we hadn’t seen Giedi Prime outside in the daytime up to this point, and Denis’ thought was there’s a black sun, so maybe it’s a sun that sucks all the color. He wanted to experiment with some approaches that were going to be indicative of a black sun and he said, ‘What about black and white?’ I said, ‘Brilliant idea, I’ve got an idea that I’ve been playing with for a few years that I want to experiment with.’”
Fraser, who helped pioneer the VFX technology known as “the volume” on “The Mandalorian” and was an early proponent of LED lighting, acknowledged he gets “pretty heavily geeky” on tech and was fascinated by the notion that there are light rays that humans can’t see with their naked eye.
“I love the fact that there’s this wave of light that we can’t see, but actually exists and the camera can see,” he said, explaining that all cameras come with an infrared light filter that prevents infrared from bleeding into the other colors. “I know for a fact that you can take those filters off very easily, because I’ve done it before,” he continued, referring to his work on “Rogue One” that cut the filters so they could light portions of the set with infrared. He said he loved the effect it had on people’s faces, but had never found a narrative reason to use it until “Dune: Part Two.”
“What it does to skin tone — you can see veins. When I tested it for Denis he was very, very happy with it,” he said. And Fraser stressed that the entire effect is all in-camera.
“It’s just the filtration. So, in a nutshell, we removed the infrared cut filter from a camera, then used a visible light cut filter. And what that looks like is a black filter, you hold that up to the sun and you can’t see anything through it because it cuts all the visible light. So to look at it, you’re like, ‘Well, hang on, this doesn’t let anything through.’ But if you put that in front of the camera, what it cuts out is all of the visible light — the red, the green and the blue — and it allows just the infrared through. So it was really as simple as that.”
The cinematographer said that for the scenes in the boxes above the arena with Stellan Starskård and Lea Seydoux’s characters, which also used artificial light, they modified a 3D camera rig with one regular camera and one infrared camera side-by-side so they could switch back and forth.
The result is unnerving and unlike anything we’ve seen before in “Dune,” which was the point. Fraser said when he and Villeneuve started talking about the sequel, while it’s a continuation of the story from the first film they wanted the visual language to be distinct “because the story becomes more evolved.”
“Paul’s character becomes more focused. He was a boy in ‘Part One’ and is a man in ‘Part Two.’ Of course he evolves and he changes, so we did want to make sure that we had an evolution in the look of the movie,” Fraser explained.
This story first appeared in the Below-the-Line Issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
