Children of Dune

Talk about pressure. In 2001, SciFi Channel's three-part miniseriesFrank Herbert's Dune walked away with two Emmys for outstandingcinematography and visual effects and more than doubled the network'sprevious largest viewing audience. The success of this epic adventurecreated large shoes for the production and postproduction teams of thisyear's follow-up, Children of Dune, to fill.

But the making of the original miniseries also provided a good ideaof what not to do. Children of Dune's production andpostproduction teams, largely similar to those for Dune, drewamply from the lessons learned the first time around.

“In many ways, we tried to think of Dune as anelaborate and expensive dress rehearsal,” says visual effectssupervisor Ernest Farino, who worked on both miniseries. “WithChildren of Dune we could do things that we couldn't do beforeand have the confidence of being able to go in and makeimprovements.”

While DP Vittorio Storaro and his Univisium format won Dunean Emmy for outstanding cinema-tography, the three-perf pull-downformat also resulted in compatibility problems in post, according toproducer David Kappes. So on Children of Dune, Kappes choseSony's 24p HD camera with Panavision modifications.

Kappes and cinematographer Arthur Reinhart enjoyed the immediacy ofviewing exact footage on set that the high-definition monitor affordedthe Prague-based production, but Kappes notes that it was alsonecessary to have HD supervisor Keith Collea on set to ensureaccuracy.

“We did have an awful lot of conferences,” says Kappes.“It's necessary to have a technician there to tell you all thetechnical things that he sees in the HD monitor because most DPs don'tyet have extensive HD experience. Even though it slowed us down a bit,it was worth it because then we could make adjustments immediately andsee on the monitor exactly what was going on the tape.”

Shooting HD also eliminated the need to scan film into a digitalformat for integration into the show's extensive CGI scenes, addsKappes, which ultimately helped Children of Dune's effects teamcomplete more computer-generated shots than the original, while on atighter schedule.

The production team experimented with some cutting-edge dailiestechnology, as well, to unite the production in Prague, the NewAmsterdam offices of executive producer Richard Rubinstein in New York,and the USA/SciFi offices in Los Angeles. On set, the production ran aseparate deck to record a dailies master. This beta master was thendelivered to Prague's Barrandov Studios, where the footage was uploadedinto Picture PipeLine's proprietary black box system and dispatchedelectronically to New York via a high-speed data transmission line.Once in New York, the footage was transferred to VHS cassettes anddistributed to the executives.

To speed up rendering times, Area 51’s Tim McHugh broke shotsinto foreground, midground, and background, varied the resolution ofeach layer, and then composited everything together at 2Kresolution.

“Because we were not shooting film where we'd have to go tothe lab and do reverse polarity transfers and the rest of it, we hadthe opportunity to try some new things, and one of them was to pipelinethe dailies back to the States,” says Kappes. “With thesix-hour time difference to New York and the nine-hour time differenceto Los Angeles, it was theoretically possible to be giving dailies toLos Angeles by 10 or 11 in the morning on the very day that they wereshot.”

Children of Dune, says Kappes, also marked the first timethat Movie Magic's Virtual Production Office and Wireless AD were usedon a lengthy, 18-week production. Kappes notes that there were bothpros and cons to trying out the relatively new technology of VirtualProduction Office, which reports production schedules via theInternet.

“What's easiest for us and what everybody knows is the oldcall sheet and the old production report method,” he notes.“We bang them out in no time, then they're Xeroxed and faxed, andit's done. This new method did free up New Amsterdam Entertainment'sNew York production office and may have freed up USA Networks fromhaving to Xerox and distribute. But it didn't help the production endas much as it helped the executive end.”

But second assistant director Trevor Puckle did find some benefitsto using Wireless AD, a pair of hand-held tablets that help ADs manageproduction reports and call sheets.

“It lays out the information for the call sheet for each day,listing all the scenes, all the artists involved, yourbreakdown,” Puckle explains. “So basically all you have todo is fill in your times, and at the end of the day, you zap thisinformation onto the other tablet, and that gives you all theinformation for your production report. It saves time because itcarries everything over to the following days and allows you to clickand drag information to make changes.”

Puckle adds that there were occasional problems with formattingreports, adding days to the schedule, and dealing with the timedifference between the Prague production and the Los Angeles-basedtechnical support team, but he says that generally Movie Magic washelpful in sorting out issues as they arose.

“At the end of the day, even if we're using new technology,we're still just making films,” says Kappes. “We had areally creative, professional crew that felt like family from havingworking together on Dune and Anne Frank. We all justpitched in and enjoyed the process.”

Farino, meanwhile, learned many things during his transition fromDune to Children of Dune. Among them was the importanceof consolidating the visual effects team.

“I originally came up with the idea of using multiple vendorswhile working on From the Earth to the Moon [for HBO], but thatwas a case where we had a 12-hour miniseries and each episode was adistinct mission in the space program, so it was easy to divide upeffects,” recalls Farino. “When I carried that method overto Dune, however, everything became more complicated becausethere was a lot of overlap.”

For Children of Dune, Farino decided to keep the majority ofthe visual effects work in-house at Burbank's Area 51, which had alsoprovided many of the visual effects for Dune. As workprogressed, Farino also employed Complete Post in Hollywood, iO Film inNorth Hollywood, AI Effects in North Hollywood, and UPP in Prague.Despite these later additions, Farino felt that the effects pipelinewas still much less fragmented than it had been on the originalminiseries.

While the postproduction schedule that commenced after principalphotography wrapped was shorter than that of Dune, Farino saysthat Children of Dune's effects team did have the benefit ofbeing involved in preproduction.

“With Dune, I got the phone call that it had been greenlit, and two weeks later we were in Prague scrambling around with thestoryboard and, to a large extent, just making everything up as we wentalong,” says Farino. “This time, we not only had theadvantage of having done the first one and having many models alreadybuilt, we could anticipate what we were going to be dealing with at anearlier stage.”

“We built animatics for major sequences long before they wereshot in Prague and were working on the show before even the directorgot involved,” says visual effects producer Tim McHugh of Area51. “For example, there's a big sequence where these giant wormshave to be captured and relocated off the planet. The whole thing wasdesigned and storyboarded, and then we began animating it here beforeproduction was rolling.”

The fact that Children of Dune was shot on high definitionalso allowed the visual effects and editorial teams to do a lot of workduring principal photography. In Prague each week, an HD dub was madeand shipped to Complete Post, which then archived and distributedfootage to editor Harry Miller and Farino's effects team.

“At the end of Dune, we didn't even get the negativeback in L.A. until six weeks after we wrapped principalphotography,” notes Farino. “But on Children ofDune, in addition to working out the purely CG shots ahead of time,we were able to get the HD tapes immediately, cut together sequences,and understand the parameters of what the actual shots were going tobe. As a result, we were able to do shots that were much moreelaborate.”

While the members of the effects team knew that Children ofDune would be shooting in HD, they didn't realize that they wouldalso need to deliver in HD until after the initial planning stages.Farino and McHugh quickly reformulated their game plan.

Before principal photography began, visual effects artists at Area51 built animatics for major CG sequences such as this one, whichportrays the capture of one of the desert planet’s giantworms.

“When we projected the amount of time and cost involved inrendering at full HD, we came up with a pretty formidable set ofnumbers,” Farino remembers. “So Tim [McHugh], while I wasin Prague, spent time at Complete Post coming up with an intermediateHD file size.”

“We essentially broke shots into foreground, midground, andbackground and, depending upon the necessary action and motion, variedthe resolution used for each layer,” explains McHugh, who, alongwith his Area 51 effects artists, handled the construction of the shotsin LightWave 7.5 and compositing in Adobe After Effects and Eyeon'sDigital Fusion. “It was generally more than video but not all theway up to 2K. Then we would composite everything together at 2Kresolution. It was a great way to speed up the renderingprocess.”

McHugh also reconfigured Area 51's renderfarms for maximumefficiency and added 40 extra processors from Hollywood-basedE-powergate.

Having tested the waters with the original Dune, the effectsteam was able to make many improvements to the type of effects that thenew production utilized. For example, the painted translightbackgrounds used on set during Dune were replaced bycomputer-generated, three-dimensional environments that were compositedwith live-action plates. Rod-puppets, such as that used for thecharacter Edric the Guild Navigator, were replaced by fully CGcharacters. The minimal hand-tracking of shots in Dune gave wayto ambitious tracking sequences using 2d3's Boujou and Realviz'sMatchMover Pro software.

Another huge difference between the effects of the two productionswas the method used to shade characters' eyes blue. In Dunemythology, the Fremen on the planet Arrakis have eyes that glow blue asa result of the spice they consume. In the original Dune, actorswore bulky colored contact lenses that at times would inhibit theirperformances. In Children of Dune, visual effects editor LindaDrake led a team of artists from Burbank-based HimAnI Productions,Pacific Title, Howard Anderson, iO Film, and UPP in digitally creatingthe blue-eye effect for almost 1,000 shots.

“They were all doing the blue eyes the same way,” saysDrake. “If they just turned on the green channel, the pupilswould become more apparent, and they could use the pupil as thetracking point for when people moved or turned. So they tracked fromthe pupils, and then by pulling mattes from the iris, let the bluelayer go into the iris and then put the matte of the pupil back on. Tome, that's what really gave it a natural look, adding the black pupilback on.”

Artists at the effects companies used a variety of solutions tocreate this effect, including Discreet's Inferno, Pinnacle's Commotion,After Effects, and Avid|DS.

IO Film used Avid|DS for the blue eyes and many other effects shots,including the compositing of city backgrounds into live-action platesand the compilation of dream sequences by Miller and iO's director ofHD postproduction Lucas Wilson. In fact, using Avid|DS actually helpedmake the scenes possible and allowed Miller to expand his role fromeditor to developer of entire effects sequences.

“There was one sequence in which the character Duncan Idaho ishypnotized by this character Bijaz,” explains Miller. “Itwas written in a completely linear fashion, but the director [GregYaitanes] told me to play with the scene. So I completely jumbled upthe geography and the storyline, playing around with the music and thedialogue and making this dwarf just appear and disappear in weird spotsof the room. Although the scene was never shot to do the effects that Icreated, with the ability to move things around in Avid|DS, we wereable to create fantastic effects.”

In so many ways, the post team enjoyed the benefits of having pastexperience, new technology, and an early start.

“This time around, producers very enthusiastically embracedthe idea of getting the visual effects up and running right from thebeginning,” reflects Farino. “We were able to hit theground running a lot faster.”