I was looking through the storyboard and concept images of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune adaptation that were made by the French artist Mœbius, and wanted to try matching the style to an animation. Trying to preserve Mœbius’s style, I made looping animations in comic panes. I decided to take the most iconic scene (for me) from the 1984 Dune film, where Paul and Jessica are escaping from a sandworm after crashing the Ornithopter. I took some liberties with removing Jessica and turning the time to day, but thought it would better serve the visuals for a short piece.
I kept each scene simple, with the heavy lifting for detail provided by the shaders. Below is a previs I created to get a sense of the desired style. I used Jodorowsky/Mœbius’s collaborative work “The Incal” as reference for how I wanted the shading and colors to look.
Below are all the animated looped frames, as well as an edited full youtube video of the scenes linked together
What if… this was made back in the days when Jodorowsky tried to make Dune…
…maybe we would have a totally different conception how a “proper” Dune has to look like
It’s a mix of shaders for each material depending on the detail. The simplest background details are just simple shader to rgb and emission shaders. For the hatching detail, they’re procedural hatching shaders which was developed starting from Kristof Dedene’s wonderful tutorial on hatching shaders on youtube. From there, it was easy to add painted textures for models and some other small effects, such as the procedural sweat on the eye close up. No scene was drop in shaders and render however, I was constantly playing with each scene to get the texture and hatching scale correct for the detail, and was continually referencing “The Incal” for where I should and shouldn’t apply certain shaders.
I’ve always been a Moebius fan and recently discovered that my library provides on-line access to many of his and Jodorowski’s works, including Incal and Edena. Through this on-line access (Hoopla Digital) I discovered Inside Moebius which I hadn’t previously read.
Good timing! You caught me in the middle of a fresh Moebius immersion!
This is spectacular(!) work. The only thing that I don’t understand is the “eye close-up shots,” where tears(?) appear to be flowing into the eye from above and then flowing out.
Anyhow – each and every one of these examples are simply stunning. This needs to be #featured.
I guess it’s a artistic expression of the fear flowing back while it is controlled and also some reaction of the spice usually visualized with slighly blue glowing eyes and the eye fluid in front of the emerging sand/spice worm…
…*even if my Dune book (only the first) and film (with Sting and Patrick Stewart) experiences are way back into the past… *
