Mick Sawaguchi Sawaguchi
Introduction
The sequel to Dune part-1, which won six awards at the 91st Academy Awards in 2021, was awarded Best Sound at the 97th Academy Awards in 2025. The sound team this time around is the combination of Richard King, a veteran of great design work on action films, and a sound team from New Zealand. The music is by Hans Zimmer and his team, who have continued to build the world of ME with a contemporary sound, using height channels in almost every track.
The desert sounds are an important part of the design of this work, so the field recording team traveled to various deserts to record a large amount of material.
Compared to the previous work DUNE PART-01, a large amount of various low-frequency components was used, and how they were organized and finished is also worth listening to. --- “CRASH and BURN” -----------------------
1 Sound Staff
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Sound Design: Richard King
Final Mix: Ron Bartlett. Doug Hemphill
Music: Hans Zimmer and 4 composers
Music rec and mix: Allan Meyerson at Remote CTL Production
Foley Artist: Dan Connell/Jhon T. Cucci at One StepUp studio
Production Sound: Gareth John
Sound Recordist: Eric Potter/ Charlie Campagna/George Vlad
Pre-Mix at Park Road Post N.Z
Final MIX at W. Brothers stage-9
2 Story and Main Characters
On the planet Arrakis, Lady Jessica, the mistress of Duke Leto Atreides, who was murdered by Emperor Shaddam IV, and her son Paul, the heir to the throne, plan to escape from the planet. He challenges the emperor.
Jessica, pregnant with her younger sister, takes over as the “Mother of Teachings” and spreads the word among the Fremen that Paul is the long-awaited savior of the Fremen, the “Lisan al-Ghaib (Savior from the outside world)”. Paul, on the other hand, drinks the “water of life” and gains the power to predict the past and future in order to fight the emperor and the Harkonnens.
With the help of Fremen leaders Stilgar and Chani, Paul rides the Sandworm, and the people of Fremen recognize that he has the qualities to live in the desert and that he is our savior.
Paul sends a letter of challenge to Emperor Shaddam IV, leading millions of Fremen warriors to hunt down the emperor and his Harkonnen army, and finally challenges the emperor to a duel.
Paul is victorious, defeating Fido Lausa of the House of Harkonnen, who had come forward to duel on behalf of the emperor, in a mortal combat. Chani, who is in love with Paul and was present at the scene, agrees to marry him in exchange for the life of her father, Emperor Shaddam IV, and leaves, unable to hide her annoyance, even though she understands Princess Irulan's actions in recognizing Paul as the next emperor.
3 Distinctive sound design for each chapter
The sound of this work is characterized by a design that combines sound effects and music more than in the previous work, so we paid attention to the position of each within the ME structure rather than to the excellent design of sound effects alone. The height channel, in particular, is characterized by the Atmos Mix, with the basic music taking over the entire sound.
3-1Introduction- 00h00m00sec-00h34m48sec
⚫️ Monologue appearing at the beginning of the FILM,
“He who controls the spice, controls everything.”
This is a male voice, but in order to impact the audience at the beginning, the original monologue is placed in the hard center and the slightly pitched lines are placed in the L-R and further pitched down and reverb added components are localized in the LS-RS, which is an example of a large sound image to strengthen the impact. Spectrum is also introduced.
⚫️ The voice of the mother of the Faithful commanding Jessica to become a mother of the Faithful on the Holy Mountain.
The Fremen Mother of God urges Jessica to drink the water of life. [Drink it”] is a short phrase, but in order to give it impact, the LS-RS has been placed with slap delay and chorus effect components in addition to the original line.
⚫️ This is the scene where the Fremen people test whether Paul is really capable of surviving in the desert.
It is a surreptitious design in which creatures such as insects and birds that hide in the heat during the day wake up and become active at night. The material used here was recorded by field recordist George Vlad in the African rainforest. Spectrum is also presented here for reference.
3-2 Transition- 00h34m48sec-00h58m00sec
⚫️ The sound of gunfire is developing in the height component as Paul and Fremen attack the spice collector vehicle and then jump on the shovel that slides in to avoid the bullets of Ohni Bee, who fires back at them from above. The explosion LFE spectrum in this scene is also presented.
⚫️ This is a 4m35sec scene of Paul riding a giant sand worm, which the sound team says was their most important work. The first half of the scene revolves around the sound effects, and after he rides the worm, the music comes to the fore to heighten the drama of the scene.
First the vibrator to call the sand worm - the thumper - echoes in the low frequencies, and the sand worm appears. Paul jumps onto its back and struggles to control the worm with a hooked wire. The sandstorm, the wind noise, and the sound of the worm running are all low frequency components on parade, but the mixing is brilliantly done by dividing the bandwidth according to the scene. Here is another spectrum.
3-3 Main body- 00h58m00sec-2h06m17sec
⚫️ Fighting scene inside the arena celebrating his niece Faid Lausa's birthday on Jedi Prime, the planet where Halkonen lives.
Halkonen is holding a major ceremony at Colosseum to determine the qualities of Fayd Lausa, who will replace the short-tempered and aggressive commander Laban, who is having trouble collecting spice on the planet Arrakis. His opponents are three surviving soldiers of the Atreides family. In the stadium, there is a 360-degree crowd and a PA blaring, and in the hard center, the metallic clang of both their daggers. The metallic sound of the opera glasses switching magnification is carefully Foley'd as Margaret Fenring, the god mother next to Harkonnen, watches the competition, although it is difficult to hear because of the dense sound.
The material was created by a New Zealand sound team that recorded the screams of a local punk rock group and synthesized them into a multi-synthesized sound.
The spectrum of this scene is as follows.
⚫️ God mother Jessica's line ordering her servant to “Let's him try”.
The lines of the Jessica's speech are short, but they are required to have impact, The dialogue was recorded not by Jessica herself, but by Ron Bartlett, who recorded his own voice at home, slightly distorted it, lowered its pitch, and added a low-frequency component of reverb to the LS-RS.
⚫️ Sandstorm encountered by Jessica and the Fremen group heading south on the Sand Worm
Paul is left alone in the north while the rest of the group heads south on the Sand Worm to meet up with the Fremen people in the south. On the way to the south, they are confronted with a huge sandstorm, which can be called a natural defense wall. I expected that Hight would also design the sandstorm, but the basic music and designed the sound effects in 5.1CH.
The sound of the sand worm's progression was designed with a hard-center Foley and a huge LFE, and the sandstorms surrounding the entire surface were designed with the low-frequency component in the front and the high-frequency component in the LS-RS. The material field-recorded in various parts of the desert is used effectively. This also presents the spectra of the overall and LFE components.
3-4 Conclusion- 2h06m17sec-2h36m46sec
⚫️ Pole and Fremen forces make an all-out attack on Harkonnen and the Emperor's army.
Paul and his men split into three separate attacks in three directions. First, they launch a missile attack on the mountain behind the base, the blast of which cascades down, and the aftermath of the blast echoes through the ceiling of the emperor's troops in the palace. This also presents the overall spectrum and the spectrum of the LFE component.
4 Recording of sound effects and Foley
The sound team started working on Part-02 immediately after the completion of Part-01, 2.5 months before the final mix, a very tight production period that everyone put in full energy until the pre-mix.
-------------------There was a lot of working from the gut----
Richard King, sound supervisor and designer, considered how to achieve a fast and efficient final mix to meet director Denis Villeneuve's request for documentary-like realism in the FILM. The pre-mix stem was done by Park Road post, the same company that produced the Lord of the Rings series. The following designs are presented here.
4-1-A Production of sand material ranging from dense sound to vast amounts of sand dust, which is the mainstay of the Arrakis planet.
Field recording in the desert by two teams; Eric Potter/Charlie Campagna spent several weeks in Death Valley and Kelso dunes recording material with an eye to all possibilities.
The other team, George Vlad, recorded alone in the Sahara Desert, from quiet winds to sandstorms. The material totaled about 100 tracks, which he organized into 4-5 track stems and brought to Final Mix.
The recording equipment used was a Zoom F6 and Sennheiser MKH8090 and 8060 with Aquarian Audio H2a hydrophones for the ground-embedded microphones.
4-1-b Sand Sound Foley
The sound of sand footsteps and walking is also enormous. Dan Connell/Jhon T.Cucci, who was in charge of Foley, brought tons of different types of sand to One StepUp studio, where Foley was conducted.
4-2 Sand Worms
The movements and voices of the Sand Worms, the inhabitants of the planet Arrakis, were also recorded in the desert.
To give the worm, which is a huge lump of meat, a heavy object was brought along to give it a sense of weight, and the material was recorded from overhead microphones, or moved over microphones buried underground, and then composed into many pitched layers.
4-3 Processing of Colosseum Crowd, Ohni-Bee, etc. from the Fremen language Chacobsa
The creators of the unique language are New Zealand sound designer David Whitehead and his colleague Michelle Child.
Some readers may remember this name. They are the team that created the voice of the alien heptopod in the same director's film “Arrival” which won Best Sound at the 89th Academy in 2016.
The crowd at the colosseum was also created by Matin Kwok with many layers of material from the screams of a punk rock group.
5 Scoring Music
Scoring was done by Hans Zimmer and his team, same as in the previous work. The sound structure was inherited from the previous work, with 4 CHs for the basics and the LFE CHs left to the sound effects. The height is 4 channels, and most of the scoring was done in 8 channels (4+4).
The percentage of use in the film is 59% at 1h38m16sec, which is less than expected.
Allan Meyerson, who was in charge of the music mix, said the key was not orchestration but how to create an expansive wall of sound with unique independent sounds from unique instrumentalists.
In terms of unique sounds, two Canadian keyboard players have joined the group, and their original synthesizers, which can produce continuous sounds, are used to create the base of the ambience.
In closing
The effort to record the production sound in the harsh climate and temperature changes of the desert deserves an award, as does the final mix by the duo, who have managed to get it just right from hundreds of tracks of pre-mixed material. They are masters at balancing the most important elements, and I think it was a major factor that they have been sound colleagues with Richard King for 40 years.
PS:For those of you who work in post-production, you may be familiar with some of the plug-ins we used for processing in Final Mix.
⚫️ Elastique Pitch V2 active in pitch processing
⚫️ 8-channel multi-slap delay used for the voice of the god mother The Cargo Cult
Slapper
⚫️ Fab-Filter HP-LPF in action in the scene where Paul rides the sound worm
