Dune 2: Are the blue eyes special effects or contact lenses? – Cinema News

In the Dune universe, Fremen have eyes that turn blue. Did the actors have to wear contact lenses or was the film crew able to do this in post-production? We explain.

On Arrakis, the planet at the center of Dune’s story, the Fremen people have a particularity. When they come into contact with a “spice,” their eyes turn mysteriously blue and glow with an otherworldly aura. The spice, also known as Mélange, is a substance produced from excretions of fungi that live in sandworm larvae.

It is a type of drug with the ability to prolong life and strengthen the immune system. The spice also allows interstellar travel for the Guild’s navigators. It induces a form of foreknowledge without which interstellar travel is impossible. Therefore, it is the most precious substance in the universe.

Contact lenses or digital effects?

How did director Denis Villeneuve and his team color the actors’ eyes? Did they use contact lenses or were digital effects used to avoid this?

Who better to answer this question than himself? Paul Lambert, the film’s visual effects supervisor? Villeneuve has already worked with him on Blade Runner 2049 and the first Dune. A specialist in digital effects, he also worked on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and First Man.

“We used all kinds of techniques for this film. For example, as there are many more Fremen characters, we had to give all of their performers this very beautiful blue, especially since there are more than a thousand shots in this film, in other words, much more than in the previous work”, he says.

A new method

“We developed a new method using what we had previously learned from the hundreds of images of blue eyes in the first film: a machine learning system, an algorithm, fed by these images from the first film, capable of identifying human eyes in an image, which gave us a matte shade for the different regions of the eye”, explains Paul Lambert.

The visual effects supervisor, with the help of his team, then used this base of different shades of matte to dye the eyes blue. According to the artist, some responded better than others, and for those that were less convincing, the team fine-tuned them by hand.

“Sometimes it felt like we were coming full circle, because we had to remove some of the blue eyes that had been generated for the non-Fremen characters, rather than adding them, because the algorithm simply detected the eyes, whether they were Fremen, Harkonnen or Sardaukar. . But it was a radically new technique”, concludes the technician.

No contact lenses for the actors, whose eyes were spared thanks to the magic of special effects!

*Stay up to date with news about films and series and receive exclusive opportunities. Listen HateCinema on Spotify or your favorite audio platform, join our WhatsApp channel and be a Card Adorer!