Early in the design phase Theo and I were working on creating a voice for Muad’dib, the desert mouse that Paul encounters after digging out from the sand storm on Arrakis. Visually similar to a gerbil or a pocket mouse or kangaroo rat, we were working with sounds of hamsters and guinea pigs to create something unusual.
These sounds lived in the cut for some time until Joe Walker, our Film Editor, texted to bring my attention to a video he had just seen on YouTube showcasing the sounds of a family of abandoned baby Red Squirrels. It had 16 million views! These sounds were like nothing either of us had heard before. I was intrigued. Could these be candidates for our desert mouse?
My wife found Dani Connor, the nature photographer who captured the video, in a forest in Sweden and connected me via email. I wrote Dani telling her I was a sound designer from Hollywood and that I wanted to put those sounds in a “movie I was working on” and was willing to pay to license them for our film (my NDA prevented me from talking at all about DUNE). This was an awkward conversation in every way. As I would find out later she didn’t believe me and thought this was a prank played on her by a friend.
After more phone calls, a contract from the Studio and a deal to compensate her properly, she sent along the audio files from the video Joe had seen. And that’s what’s in the film. No processing, no designing, no plugins, just the right sound in the right place found improbably and fortuitously.
Here’s a shot of the squirrel that’s in our movie:
and here’s a link to the video so you can hear it:
