The clip below is one you should play twice—the second time with your eyes closed.
Apart from providing an early visit to the world of Dune, which makes its global debut Friday at the Venice Film Festival, this sequence also features bracing sound design aimed at making the viewer feel the concussions from the futuristic personal body shields.
The upcoming film from director Denis Villeneuve (Arrival, Blade Runner 2049) stars Timothée Chalamet as Paul Atreides, a young prince who is still figuring out where he stands among the worlds that his family rules. Josh Brolin costars as Gurney Halleck, the battle-scarred veteran who is trying to train the young man how to protect himself when House Atreides finds itself under inevitable attack.
“The most important thing about Paul is that he’s trying to find his place in the world,” Villeneuve tells Vanity Fair. “Paul is supposed to be a wise one, someone that is older than his age in his mind, but still has the body of a 16-year-old.” His family’s most trusted soldiers, Gurney and Jason Momoa’s Duncan Idaho, are trying to build him into a warrior. “There’s a little bit of a Three Musketeers thing about Dune where we have teachers around him that are very alpha male,” Villeneuve says. “They are Paul’s only friends. Paul was raised as a kid surrounded by adults who are teaching him.”
This scene also demonstrates the new film’s surprising fidelity to novelist Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi epic. Many of Brolin’s lines (“Mood? What has mood to do with it? You fight when the necessity arises” and “Look down…you’d have joined me in death”) are lifted nearly verbatim from the source text.
The filmmakers also drew heavily from Herbert’s description of the story’s iconic personal protective fields. (“Paul snapped the force button at his waist, felt the crinkled-skin tingling of the defensive field at his forehead and down his back, heard external sounds take on characteristic shield-filtered flatness.”) Instead of starting their work with the glow of the shield, they started with the sound of it.
“One of the great things that Denis allowed us to do was to start the ball rolling with sound and then have the VFX team look at what we have, listen to what we were doing, and start their first iterations of what we thought the shield should look like,” says Theo Green, the film’s supervising sound editor and sound designer.
The raw ingredient in the body shield’s sound was the rat-a-tat of automatic gunfire, similar to this or the effect clip below. That raw sound was “filtered out so you can just hear the sub impacts, the throb, and then it was processed through a synthesizer and repeated multiple times,” says Green. “That’s the vibration you are hearing.”
Practically every sound that he and fellow supervising sound editor Mark A. Mangini created for Dune started with an organic recording of something real. That was vital to creating “a believable acoustic universe that’s like the one we live in,” Mangini says. “If our original basis is an acoustic sound, however much we mangle it, it still retains those aural cues that are built into the recording that tell the audience, without words, obviously: This is real. We’re working on a subconscious level.”
The result of that processing on the gunfire sound was something akin to the contented purr of a large cat. As the shield is struck, the sound of it—as with its visual appearance—becomes more pronounced. “We discovered the way to get out of the trope of a ‘humming sound field’ was for it only to [activate] when it needs to be a shield,” Mangini says. “Then it would recede into the background, thus making a much more dynamic shape to the sound. It’s very forceful in the moment it’s protecting the occupant, then disappears as if it weren’t there.”
Also, the shield is not totally invulnerable, and the agitation of the sound needed to convey that. “The idea of the technology is that if you come at it fast with a sword, it will repel that sword,” Green says. “But if you sneak a sword in very slowly, then you can get through the shield. It’s not a perfect technology.”
So that purring cat becomes increasingly threatened when the threat is closest. “We started with this kind of low, purring vibration, but it wasn’t quite cutting through. It wasn’t really feeling dangerous enough,” Green says. “And that was also a comment Denis had for a lot of our first goes.”
Then an accident happened. “I was playing around with that purring, deep sound, but something went wrong,” Green says. “I put it into a synthesizer that normally breaks things up, makes particles out of the sound, and it just couldn’t handle the bass. It started freaking out and making clicking sounds and errors all over the place.”
In other words, the purr became a panic, which was just what they needed. “Sometimes it’s worth appreciating mistakes and seeing whether they have a place,” Green says. “Denis heard that early, horrible kind of clicking, error-filled version and was like, ‘Ooh, we might have something. That sounds dangerous. It sounds like something that would have enough force that it could repel a blade.’”
Green and Mangini began “cutting up” and sprinkling that error sound in to replace “swooshes and clangs” of the swords when they struck the shield. “When the blows are at their hardest, we started to build an impression of a shield that really feels like the air is vibrating with little particles and molecules that are pushing things away.”
One of the last details that Villeneuve introduced was the notion that the shield would sound an alarm if it was being slowly penetrated. “So we introduced a little kind of dit-dit-dit-dit, which is actually a high guitar string,” Green says.
The VFX team built upon that by devising a concept that visibly flashes when you are in danger. “There are blue flashes that the shield gives off, but that shimmering red means it is about to be breached.”
These audio textures allow the viewer to feel the effect when they watch it. Now try it again by playing the sequence with the sound up, but your eyes closed. If you can still sense the action of the duel, the sound designers have accomplished their mission.
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