
Crafting the Oppressive Sunlight of Dune: Part 2

Production
- Dune: Part 2
Production Info
- Director: Denis Villenueve
- Cinematographer: Greig Fraser ACS, ASC
- Year: 2024
- Production Company: Warner Bros.
How Greig Fraser ACS, ASC used LED lighting to create the intense sunlight of Planet Arrakis.
Challenge
Dune: Part 2 continues Denis Villeneueve’s stunning adaptation of the classic sci-fi novel, with Greig Fraser returning as cinematographer. The filmmakers would face challenges very familiar to the characters in the film: heat and power.
Fraser wanted to create large-scale, realistic hard sunlight for the soundstage sets. Traditionally, this would require arrays of traditional tungsten or HMI lights. To match the scale of Patrice Vermette’s concept art as faithfully as possible, dozens of lamps would be needed, and the power draw would be a sobering 200,000kW. The lamps would generate an enormous amount of heat, putting a strain on the stage’s already-taxed air conditioning system.
This led to experimenting with many types of HMIs, Tungsten, and LED fixtures. Fraser says. “I was really staying with LED and away from tungsten, but the LEDs and even Dinos weren’t getting us the light we needed. I called up Aputure and said, ‘Whattaya got?’”
Solution
The Aputure team sent Fraser fifty Light Storm 1200ds, the brightest point source LED light on the market at the time. The filmmakers used 42 of these lamps to build one of the LED array “suns” used on stages. The array drew just 60,000kW of power and output a fraction of the heat a tungsten array would have.
Fraser liked the Light Storm 1200d’s skin tone rendering, output, and dimmability so much that he also used them for the shafts of light in sets like the Fremen Communal Dome Room, the Emperor’s Tea Room, and Bene Gesserit Mohiam’s Office.
Results
Even at a blockbuster scale, Fraser and his team showed that modern LED lighting allows for new and accessible solutions without sacrificing quality.
Dune: Part 2’s acknowledgments for cinematography include nominations from the Academy Awards, the American Society of Cinematographers, the British Academy Film Awards, the British Society of Cinematographers, Critics’ Choice Awards, and many more.

“[Patrice Vermette’s] artwork was such that the light coming through those shafts was quite sharp and edgy, and we just couldn’t, for the life of us, get a sharp-enough light from our existing arsenal.”
Greig Fraser ACS, ASC
Cinematographer

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Fraser liked the Light Storm 1200d’s skin tone rendering, output, and dimmability so much that he also used them for the shafts of light in sets like the Fremen Communal Dome Room, the Emperor’s Tea Room, and Bene Gesserit Mohiam’s Office.

“I was really staying with LED and away from tungsten, but the LEDs and even Dinos weren’t getting us the light we needed. I called up Aputure and said, ‘Whattaya got?’”
Greig Fraser ACS, ASC
Cinematographer
The Light Storm 1200d “sun” array drew just 60,000kW of power and output a fraction of the heat a tungsten array would have.

The filmmakers used the Light Storm 1200d “sun” array in exterior scenes like Paul’s arrival to the South.


Light Storm 1200ds provide overhead ambient lighting in the Emperor's Tea Room.



A line of Light Storm 1200ds gave Mother Mohiam’s Office its harsh slash of window light.


Greig Fraser, ACS, ASC is an Oscar-winning Australian Cinematographer celebrated for his visually stunning and emotionally resonant imagery.
A graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts, Fraser's dozens of cinematography credits include Let Me In (2010), Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), and The Batman (2022). He received a BAFTA win for Best Cinematography on Lion (2016) and an Academy Award for his work on Dune (2021).
Fraser has developed a reputation as an innovator, pushing the limits of both cinema production technology and collaboration as he continues to lens some of the world’s biggest films.
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