When you think of Dune, the first thing that comes to mind is likely the worm. The great sand beast rising from the earth, maw gaping, confronting the characters with a simple truth - for all their advancements, for all their strength, for all their fighting, they cannot escape nature. To celebrate Dune coming to digital download today, we spoke to three of the men who made the worm come to life; visual effects supervisor Paul Lambert, head of production design Patrice Vermette, and director of photography Grieg Fraser.

“The way in which the process happened was that Denis [Villeneuve, Dune's director] and Patrice had spent a good eight months prior to me joining just concepting the entire movie, and that included the worm,” Lambert says. “When I joined, he already had these beautiful images but obviously, it didn't move. It was down to visual effects as to how we get this thing to move on screen to feel believable, and Denis wanted this almost prehistoric creature, which wasn't very agile but had been around for thousands of years roaming the desert. Its skin was basically these solid, tough plates interconnected with soft flesh. So we did tests where the worm had a quite soft overall look, and it felt very spongy. But then, as we progressed, those plates became far more rigid. And what you ended up with, even though you don't see a lot of this in the movie, is an accordion effect. So as the worm turns, these plates come together, so the worm isn't very agile, and it can take a good half a mile to actually turn right.”

Related: The Matrix Resurrections Resents Us All, And It's Right ToAs Vermette explains, this initial concepting did not begin from scratch. Not only is there David Lynch’s version of Dune to draw from, but also various official covers of the Frank Herbert novels, as well as thousands of pieces of fan art. The worm had to look realistic and grounded, as is Villeneuve’s style, but it also had to appease the imagination of millions.

Dune

“The worm was something that we felt the pressure of,” he says. “[We needed to make] something interesting, because it's so much part of the Dune mythology and how important it is, but there’s been a gazillion number of interpretations if you go through the internet. For the idea of the worm we explored multiple versions with big teeth, a shark head - from the beginning Denis had a strong opinion about how the worm would move before going through the look of it. For the design of it we explored the whale, how does a whale swim, and we started comparing the sand dunes to the sea with the ripples. Let's see how a whale moves, how it travels underwater. Denis was like, ‘it’d be awesome if the worms could be like that’.

“So from that starting point, I was starting to think about all the big teeth we see in these interpretations, is it right? I don't think it's right, because what would that worm feed from? And then I got back to the whale, and how whale teeth filter the phytoplankton in the oceans. Denis and I, we always try to anchor everything into a certain reality, nothing is very magical, everything needs to make sense. So those teeth started to determine the physiology of its face and how it's basically a big digestive tract made of muscle. That's how we started thinking. As opposed to a snake or a whale, we started thinking about the root, and the importance of ecology in Frank Herbert's book. So the skin of the worm is much influenced by tree bark and textures of roots, mixed in there like the back part of a rhinoceros. But mostly it's skin is like bark. There are some very subtle parts in the movie when you don't see the worm when they fly over the desert but you see trenches which have been covered because of the wind but that go in different directions than the wind would go. That's the footprint of a worm that has travelled.”

While Vermette’s inspirations considered the largest scopes, analysing whales and trees, Lambert went much smaller. “We did various animation tests referencing earthworms, referencing snakes, any form of creature which didn't have limbs, and trying to get that sense of living,” he says. “But then what tended to happen was that things became very scientific and very biological. It wasn't very cinematic. How it progressed was that it became almost wild, like you'd have waves crashing through the sand, and a lot of the work in the visual effects company was like trying to get the sand around the worm, and how they interacted. One of the keys to a successful visual effect is when you have a reference which you can match to, and unfortunately you can't find any reference of sand being displaced by that amount. Now, I did try to get some reference like explosions in the dunes, but I was reminded that we're in the Middle East and it’s probably not a good idea to be setting off random explosions.”

At this point, Lambert says, the process moved to a series of iterations. The big picture decisions had been locked in, and now it was a case of making sure a version is not too big, not too small. Not too fast, not too slow. Version by version, the worm came to life. It was at this late stage, when other characters in the film became part of the considerations, that Fraser’s work linked up with the worm.

“One of the great things about doing a film like Dune with people like Paul and Patrice is that invariably, I'm watching the design process as a bit of an observer from the back of the bus,” he says. “I'm seeing all the iterations, I'm seeing the way that teeth go in, or the teeth out, or the teeth cross - I'm just watching all those happen. And because those guys and Denis have a very sophisticated sense of taste, every time they make a decision to move forward, it's always a case of me going ‘good, that's the best choice, that's what I would have done’. At this point in time, because the worm itself doesn't interact directly with any characters physically, I don't need to get too involved in the texture of it. But what was exciting was testing the process of the way that the worm actually swims, which is effectively liquefaction of sand. It's that whole thing that happens in an earthquake, where - I shouldn't say this, because my house is built on sand in Venice Beach, and I'm hoping it doesn't ever do this - but if you shake it into certain vibration, the thing becomes liquid, you can actually put your hand in and it behaves like water. So trying to get to that point in the way the worm moves logically through the sand was really exciting.”

Zendaya Dune

While there is no physical interaction with the characters at this stage, the face-off is one of the most iconic images of Dune’s first half, which is what Villeneuve’s movie deals with. This, Vermette says, prompted further design dilemmas.

"We started having discussions about the digestive system and how the mouth would open up, and doing physiology analysis and experimenting. Would those teeth move up? Would they move in? Does it swallow or harvest? Did these things need to move out of the way to access the throat? How does that open? How do those muscles move? That was the journey of the worm. On the skin, we wanted to feel the age of those creatures. It’s like rock formations, it’s like icebergs in the ocean. Going with that principle, the worm could sometimes scrape on rocks, so you'd see the scars, and feel the history of those creatures. The other important thing for Denis and I was the first time we see an image of the worm on Arrakis, it's seen as a divinity, almost a godlike creature. I was thinking maybe it's local artists that depicted that, it's the sun coming out of his teeth, it's a godlike creature that commands respect, as opposed to fear. It needed the balance: Do you fear? Or do you respect it?”

Dune is available on digital download now and 4K UHD, Blu-Ray, DVD and VOD on 31st January.

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