Dune Special Effects Series A

This is part of a series of special effects I did that was done for "Frank Herbert's Dune" shown on the Sci Fi channel.

The first scene they shot Alec Newman, Saskia Reeves and Dr. Yueh (Robert Russell) in the train car.

In the second scene it's the Duke (William Hurt) and his son (Alec Newman) on the train. There's a bit more green spill in this shot. I made multiple-mattes to eliminate the spill. That is: doing a different color correction on the problem parts of the set and compositing that second layer with the first layer.

Once I had a matte and composited the running footage as a background I really only had to make sure the color of the "outside" matched the color temperature on the interior of the traincar. A bit of color correction and everything looks like it belongs together.

Obviously there were no real windows on this train. So I had to fake them. I did that by duplicating the foreground frame (the frame with the actors in it), using half of it - say the left side with Paul in it - and by various manipulations make the new layer shadowy and transparent and of course slightly offset so it looks like a reflection in a window (which does not exist!) I duplicated the right side of the frame and naturally had to give it a different offset from Paul's reflection, but did the same voodoo there.

Then I made the background a bit "mottled" like the viewer was looking at the scene through a bathroom shower glass gave it enough of a separation that the effect fools the eye.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• animation
• filmmaker
• reel
• Dune
• special
• effects
• TV