Original subtitles

I'm Joe Walker, and welcome to my Arrakis-based cutting room

to have a look at the "Dune 2" timeline.

So what I've got in front of me,

what I thought I'd show you is

a very early version of a scene.

The scene is one in which Rabban

detonates out of anger, really.

A mountain on Arrakis in search of Muad'Dib lands,

and then is totally outmaneuvered by a Fremen army

led by Paul Atreides, played by Timothée Chalamet.

So this is a really early version.

This is the first assembly.

By this stage, it would have been shot in Hungary

a couple of months before this particular cut.

And it shows you the kind of nonsense

that's going on in my timeline here.

Basically, if I point to things here,

you'll see that's a masking layer.

Without that, I've got time codes and vision here,

which helps me sometimes.

The film was shot in two formats.

It was shot 4:3, IMAX.

And sometimes,

an A65 camera, which gives you a 6K 2:39 image.

It's really to do with the fact that sometimes

it's impossible to get height in a 2:39 image if you don't,

you have to kind of go the other way round.

So basically, we're taking a 4:3 image like that,

and cropping off the top and bottom to make a 2:39 image.

But in the case of the A65 footage,

we're creating an IMAX in the center and adding sides,

if that makes sense.

So our timeline had to be adapted to,

we had a kind of unique setup that allowed us

to carry high quality images that we could zoom into later

if we needed to and play around.

Although really, when you see the final result,

Greig Fraser's grading is a really great place to start

when you're assembling.

Anyway, I'll talk less and show you some stuff.

So when I'm looking at building a sequence,

which is gonna end up as a VFX shot,

in the case of this, the ornithopters started life

as a proxy camera.

And I'm really throwing into the timeline

all manner of things like the storyboards,

which you see on the left hand side there.

This is a guide and this was one particular shot

that I think we ended up changing.

I was trying to kind of find a shot

that identified the mountain.

I had a very good reveal of a mountain,

but also a very good sweep round.

So we ended up combining the two.

So you can see how crudely I do this.

I just do a garbage matte,

as one of my assistants used to call it.

And then I hand it to my VFX editor,

in this case, Eddy Garcia,

who do a lovely job of trying to stitch it together.

Here I'm showing on screen the storyboards on the left,

aerial cameras, which have multiple cameras

pointed out of a helicopter, and then the proxy.

So the ornithopter, which is,

they did build real ornithopters,

but they couldn't fly them.

So when we're flying,

we always have a real world component

to base the VFX image on.

This is Denis Villeneuve's approach generally,

which is to try and film as much as possible for real.

And if you can't shoot it for real,

then you can land a helicopter

and use the dust lifting up off the floor, for example.

So sometimes the timeline becomes a bit of a,

I get used to it and I have to remember

when I'm showing people unfamiliar with it,

that it's all gonna end up fine one day.

It's really a repository for little items

that are gonna be figured out later.

For example, this indicates in storytelling terms

that there's, the vehicle does some special thing.

Let's have a look at the storyboards indicate

that there's a number of ornithopters are gonna leave

and detonate the mountain.

Side shot, another shot.

So here is quite a complicated shot

because it goes from storyboards

with a kind of plate that was shot for use later.

And we just kind of like blur blend into a real shot here.

So it's hard to describe,

but basically I'm putting all stages.

If I haven't got a shot at this point,

I still need to time the shot.

Otherwise I'll say it's too short or too long

and waste a lot of money in VFX department.

Here's a really good example.

The plate at the bottom, if I play that.

(engine roaring)

It's just a kind of dust plate.

And then there's a little plate

that shows the Harkonnens emerging.

You can see in the center of frame.

That was a plate for the Harkonnens moving.

And then this is how bad it gets.

And it's a bit laughable.

I can't believe Denny hasn't fired me.

(engine roaring)

So that's what I'd hand Eddy, my VFX editor,

and he would work up a temp.

(engine roaring)

(engine roaring)

So he's combined three plates

and done actually a really nice job.

But that's nowhere near the finished VFX shot.

It's just a guide that I give for timing.

How slowly do I think the thing should move?

At what point should the Harkonnens appear?

And you know, kind of,

I get it into the range

and then people far more talented than me

make it look spectacular.

So that's a kind of rough idea.

The shots here have got a little bit of fire

added to them, for example.

There's a little bit of work on the plates here.

Eddy's added a little

destination on that shot

so that we could play with the timing.

It's also a very good guide for the sound department.

And talking about sound,

what we're looking at here in the timeline

are the dialogue tracks, colored yellow in this case.

For convenience sake, I've just divided things up

into dialogue here, tracks one to six.

And then the rest is all sound effects.

We do a huge amount of work.

This is, don't forget, this is a very early cut.

So even when we're assembling,

I'm adding as much sound as I can.

For example, I've got footsteps here that I've laid.

(footsteps crunching)

And I've added a few other things.

There's a couple of

(wind)

wind tracks,

quiet rooms, subsonics,

just a low, it's hard to hear,

but it's a low threatening sound.

And here,

a wind track.

This one's probably taken from Dune One as a guide.

Then the dialogue.

(breathing heavily)

Mostly breaths.

I use key frames.

I'm really keen on key frames.

I spend forever on it.

These key frames are my,

if I'm looking at an edit,

I'll tend to expand the track.

Have a look at it.

That's a guide, gives me an idea of where the breaths are.

(breathing heavily)

It makes it really easy if you wanna kind of cut.

You didn't like that breath

and you wanna use another one.

Let's roll it.

(breathing heavily)

So I'm just in roughly the same place.

I put a lower pitch one.

(breathing heavily)

That sounded just the same.

I might put that back.

So you've got your dialogue tracks.

There'll be sound effects, footsteps.

Sometimes I do really stupid things

like put sound effects slightly out of sync

by two or three frames.

And it's a poor man's delay.

Just feels nice in the desert.

(breathing heavily)

Let's get rid of the dialogue there

and play the footsteps.

You can hear that short delay.

I just, I like it.

It drives everybody in sound department nuts

that I do all this stuff.

A little bit of sound here for the pistol.

(gun firing)

It's a flesh hit.

(gun firing)

Body, I love body falls.

There's nothing more exciting to me than a body fall.

They're very standard sound effects.

And of course I wouldn't ever insist

that a sound department uses them.

They've got much better recordings of their own.

That's something that everybody's heard

a thousand times probably.

But it's, I need to kind of map out the rhythm of things

and it helps me kind of find the rhythm of a scene

to fill it up with sound.

And I'm blessed with good assistant like Chris Voutsinas.

He helps me do that.

I mean, it tends to work though.

As I progress the cart,

I will hack things around a little bit

in the interest of time.

And Chris comes back and scoops up and tidies the sound up.

So that's basically what we're talking about.

It's, let's have a little look

at what part of the sequence looks like.

(clicking)

(engine revving)

(heavy breathing)

(heavy breathing)

- Muad'Dib!

Show yourself!

(gun firing)

(heavy breathing)

(screaming)

(glass breaking)

- You get the idea.

I'm trying to make it as rhythmic as possible

because I love when you give sound effects a chance

to tell the story and not to make Hans Zimmer

do all the kind of legwork really.

I love it when the music gives you something

that you can feel rather than necessarily,

doing all the kind of hard work of creating tension

and things like that.

I think there's tremendous tension in silence

and the timeline hopefully reflects that.

So if we want to have a look at a later version,

we're talking about 19th fine cut.

When I look at the bins here, here's the difference.

This was January 27th, 2023.

And this is nine months later, more or less.

Although the cut for this, I would say,

is one of the cuts that changed the least.

Now you can see it's gone a long way.

All of this amazing explosion stuff

has come from the VFX department.

So looking at my timeline now,

I'm looking at what you see there

is a mask layer on the top on V11, V10.

It's kind of a confidence check.

This isn't the final graded image,

but as part of the process with the DI,

when they've graded, we get a comp check.

So we're able to just make sure that each shot is matching.

Sometimes there's little conform errors.

We can look at the original and we can compare it to

the latest version and just say that,

yeah, it's completely in sync.

There's nothing missing.

It's got the latest VFX version.

I keep, because we are always capable of reworking a shot

at any stage, obviously I keep a lot of stuff still going.

That's something that was back in January,

is still there in October.

It's just a resource if I need to kind of get in there

and restitch a cut.

The dialogue is all still there.

It got enhanced a little bit with various crash mixes

from the sound department that got brought

into the timeline.

So the dialogues expanded a little bit.

This, for example, is a dialogue stem.

So that's a feed from a temp mix, I think.

It's not the finished sound, but it's as near as damn.

It's something that we would have done

for a preview audience.

And that's featuring a beautiful delay effect

from Ron Bartlett, I think.

I'm carrying a number of old, you know,

bits of dialogue from pre-mixes from previous dubs

of the preview mix.

Sound effects I'm still carrying,

but of course these things are all muted.

I can unmute it and show you that the footsteps

are still there should we ever need to go back to them.

So I'd unmute that and it would, it still plays.

Then further down by this stage,

music department have come through.

So this lowest step here, I think, is music,

but there's no music here until quite late in the sequence.

Not even short story.

Yeah, there is a little music in here.

And above these muted tracks are kind of older versions

of the temps that I would have got from Clint Bennett,

my music editor.

So this is kind of carrying a lot of older versions of things

because at any moment, even on the dub stage,

me and Denis would probably go in there and fix something

if the sound isn't working right.

And one of the things that we've tried to do

is give sound a really decent kind of roadmap in the Avid.

So that Richard King and his team of sound editors

can really work with a roadmap that we know to work,

that it's got the contours,

but leave it to him to express that the best way he can

with fresh recordings and a whole team of people

working on sound effects properly.

I'm actually showing you this timeline.

This is my 19th fine cut.

And in fact, I've got the wrong timeline.

I will tend to kind of save a timeline

for different stages.

This one is appropriate for the 19th fine cut.

I mean, it's one way of organizing.

It's just to color things.

If I muted a lot of these takes,

you'd see that there's a kind of pattern to it

that basically dialogue is yellow at the moment

on this particular show.

It's not consistent across everything I've done.

I just make it up every time I start

where sound effects are always gonna be some form

of kind of green or greeny blue.

Let's see what's, this lifts up.

Yeah, light green.

So visually, it's a complicated timeline to work with.

And certainly colors help me.

And labeling is super kind of,

you have to kind of get things really well labeled

to be able to kind of make sense of it later.

I would also say that I don't,

I'm not all the way specifying what tracks are.

And of course, you're constantly updating.

As your timeline grows,

you're having to bust a hole in it

and add a couple of tracks

if you've suddenly got some stereo dialogue coming in,

whereas before they were mono.

So we're basically always chasing the dragon

as far as that's concerned.

I keep it simple.

It's just dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, stereo,

dialogue, stem, dialogue, stem, crowd.

MK dialogue refers to Martin Kwok,

who's one of our beautiful sound people

working on dialogue over in New Zealand.

He was sending me really early

because we were working on things

like the gladiatorial arena,

almost from a week after it was shot.

I was working in collaboration with our friends

in New Zealand to develop the sound for that

because it was so complicated.

And after a while you end up saying,

look, I've got 32 tracks of cheering, basically.

Can I, can you chunk it down for me?

And you carry a timeline of your own

and give me some kind of like easier thing

to manipulate in the timeline.

Sound effects, I don't really break it down very much

because everything just gets moved around.

And ultimately this work gets forgotten,

hopefully when better stuff turns up.

And stems, foley stems, background sound effects stems.

That's a very standard way of breaking things down

from the sound team is that you get basically

spot and hero effects as an SFX stem

and then a stereo pair of foley only,

and then background atmosphere.

So wind and things like that.

Let's just actually listen to what that sounds like.

Let's find a gunshot, please.

The gunshot, if my theory is correct,

that should be a gunshot here.

(gunshot)

That's rather lovely.

And then background atmospheres.

That's gonna be very quiet,

but it's 'cause it's meant to be a super quiet scene

apart from when people start banging their guns.

So then music, this is stuff that comes from,

these muted tracks are stuff that comes from

my music editor and I'm constantly re-editing that

and using key frames to balance it against the dialogue

and other things, sound effects.

So if I lift up this particular track,

let's solo that track, that's gonna be a

piece of music from Clint.

(dramatic music)

Done a very crude key frame just to get it out

of the way of dialogue at the time.

If I play the whole sequence without this track,

should make some sort of sense.

(dramatic music)

Well, there's a thing, we dropped the music.

(laughs)

So in the final version, there's no music there

or very little, there's nothing.

Yeah, I'm soloing the final music, crash mix

and there's nothing there.

It's so strange VFX, they always want to kind of

abbreviate a scene, an RAB means something to them

on a list, but it means almost nothing to me.

I mean, this scene, if I was gonna categorize it

as anything, I'd say it was scene 44.

But they need a way of organizing the VFX shots.

So that's what all these dots are for.

I will occasionally drop a dot on as a way of saying,

I would almost certainly when this gunshot happened,

identify the frame, although it's lost now

in the midst of time, but at one stage,

I would have dropped a little red marker on there

or something that is identified as my little mark

that Eddy, my VFX editor could say, yeah,

that's where the gunshot is gonna be

or that's where the little laser light is gonna be.

Let me show you the bin 'cause that is probably

where I use markers the most.

I mean, this is a very standard thing

that the beginning of a take gets a marker.

So basically action, but here I think,

action.

These are dailies.

Down.

Breathe.

It may surprise people to hear an interior sound on this.

This is in a special stage in Budapest.

I'm giving away big trade secrets here,

but this was not shot outdoors.

It was shot in basically a huge steam bath

in Origo Studios.

Basically every actor on the show just got tons and tons

of dust thrown at them on a daily basis.

Some of the people in this film are actually

really very attractive when you get to meet them.

But let me show you a bin.

That's how I'd organize a bin, hoping that you can see that.

This shows you some early stages because I will tend

to cut the storyboards earlier than filmmaking.

It's just my way of getting into the process

and trying to find a kind of rhythm to things.

I'll start long before they shoot anything.

So I do have a resource.

All the storyboards are painstakingly brought

into the Avid and I can edit them.

You can see here, I've laid things out

that these are all the takes.

It's scene 44, Y indicates that it's second unit.

This is a slate AB, take 10.

And I'll tend to ask if there's anything selected,

then I'll ask for an asterisk on it.

It's a quick way of going well.

That was your selected take.

Although honestly, Denis does me a great favour

of not overshooting.

He always briefs his camera team to be like snipers.

He doesn't like running and running and running

and doing multiple pickups.

He'll try and develop a really good shot.

And so he doesn't overshoot.

It tends to be single camera.

In this case, this is all single camera.

It's second unit and second unit will tend

to kind of finesse quite complicated shots.

So this is a higher than average amount of takes,

take 16.

That wouldn't be typical for the main unit

where I'm looking at anything from three to six takes

or maybe a few more.

With second unit, it's quite usual for them

to just keep finessing the smaller parts.

They have also, although they're under a lot of pressure,

they have slightly less time pressure than main unit.

So this organises the shots.

There are one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight,

nine, 10 shots.

I've got a few little extra things.

I hide the VFX plates.

So if you open up the bin, it says VFX paints

and points me over here and it will show me things

that the VFX team need like the balls and reflectors

and material that might even be used photographically.

So that's the inside life of a bin.

What I'm showing you here is the timeline

with all the storyboards that I've edited

and I've laid music up and sorry, sound effects up

in this case.

I've looked, part of the attempt is to kind of hold off

from using music as long as possible

and see if you can find a rhythm out of the shots,

the dialogue, the performance, the sound effects,

all in a way are a kind of music to me.

So let's have a look at a little section of this.

You can probably see on this timeline

that is just storyboards, nothing else.

I haven't got any other material at this point.

I've done a few picture in picture kind of,

everybody has a different way of doing the same thing.

Me, I like picture in picture 'cause it's really easy.

I can show you in this case,

I've just maybe changed the position a little bit

of the Y-axis.

Yeah, I lifted it up a little bit.

That's partly in anticipation of a IMAX shot

that has to convert to a 2:39.

And also this is something I can feed back to Denis and Greig

and think ahead a little bit about framing,

although things change completely on set

and I'm very much taking care of what they shoot.

But at this stage, I'm just,

where the storyboard isn't perfect, I'll try

and improve it a little bit.

It is perfect.

I'm just, I'm sometimes short of things to do.

And I do these stupid little things that suggest,

that help suggest a tilt down in this case.

So let's have a little listen to that.

(air whooshing)

I mean, I hate to tell you, but I grew up in the sixties

and that would be kind of basically family entertainment

on television in 1969.

It was, I grew up on children's programs

where basically they had two cameras in a studio pointed

at a book and sometimes you'd see somebody's hand

turning the page.

So this is high art to me still.

So I'll do little things just to kind of convey speed

of things, nobody, it's just an indication at this point,

more for me than anybody else.

How long will I need for a shot?

How can I time the thumper?

Let's have a look at a section from it.

(thump)

(thump)

(metal hooks clicking)

(thump)

(thump)

(thump)

(thump)

(thump)

I can drive my assistants nuts with my dedication

to creating a really clean timeline.

And I know it's probably speaks more of some kind

of spectrum deficiency in me than an artistic pursuit.

But here's my view is I try, you know,

we're gonna share this timeline with a number of departments

like VFX, sound department, even to a degree

with the music editor and the music department.

And it has to be really clean.

You know, I go through and tidy the thing up like mad

so that it's unambiguous.

I try and avoid lots of muted tracks

that aren't there anymore

and take people down rabbit holes.

So thank you for just enjoying this beautiful obsession

of mine to create the one day I'll do the perfect timeline

and then retire.

But until now, here's my little messy middle.

And thank you for joining me

and having a look at June part two timeline.