Skip to main content

My DUNE diorama

Having watched the new and improved Dune film on HBO-Max three times now (and loving every second of it), I thought it was time to make a Dune diorama for myself. I love the Dune universe, having been introduced to it by my father many moons ago.

The scene I depict is a giant sandworm passing by a castle built on solid rock, on the planet of Arrakis--better known as Dune. I saw the David Lynch-directed version of Dune with my father on opening day, back in 1984. While that version had its moments, we didn't really care for it too much.

The sandworm and the base of the castle were sculpted from Scupley, which had to be baked. The castle itself was sculpted from Apoxie putty, which air-hardened on its own. The Apoxie putty allowed for more details in such a small scale. My father and I watched the Dune miniseries on the Sci-Fi Channel, and by that time, I had read all six of Frank Herbert's original Dune novels. The less said about the miniseries, the better.

The desert is actually Flex Paste from Woodland Scenics. This also air-hardens--and when it did, I painted it, just as I had painted the sandworm and castle. Unfortunately, my dad--having passed away a while ago--couldn't see the new Dune film. But I loved it; the 2021 Dune is finally the Dune that I know and love that's been presnted on screen. I think my father would have liked this new version, as well. --SF

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Explorer From Another World

It’s Friday night during the summer in Beutter county, an idyllic farming community in Indiana, and the good folks are settling in for what should be another humdinger of an evening. Until their plans are shattered by the arrival of an Explorer From Another World! This turns out to be an alien (Gemma Sterling) who starts savagely killing people from the moment it disembarks from its flying saucer. Local kids Eddie (Colin McCorquodale), Marybeth (Sage Marchand) and Culpepper (Nolan Gay) are planning on seeing a movie, but it looks like they’ll be battling for the very survival of the human race instead! Explorer From Another World is a wonderfully done throwback to the B-movies of the 1950s and 1960s. Ably directed by Woody Edwards (who gives himself a small cameo as Hank in the sheriff’s jail cell), the film is forty five minutes long, but manages to tell its torrid but funny story very effectively in the time allotted. And the short running time tracks when you...
Post a Comment
Read more

Presence -- A Review

Presence, the latest film from director Steven Soderbergh ( Sex, Lies and Videotape, Out Of Sight ), is based on his real life experiences with what he believes is a ghost in his own home. Inspired by his spectral roommate, Soderbergh wrote a few pages of a script, which he handed to David Koepp ( Panic Room, Jurassic Park ), who finished it. The film was shot in a house in Crandall, New Jersey, over just eleven days in September 2023 (they received an interim SAG-AFTRA agreement during the strike that year). Soderbergh shot this in the ‘found footage’ style, using only one camera, with himself as the camera operator. The result is that Presence is a haunted house story that is told from the point of view of the ghost. And it’s marvelous. But instead of the typical ’found footage’ movie, which is supposed to be culled together from film or video that is literally found after the fact, we see everything that’s happening in this house through the ‘eye...
Post a Comment
Read more

My Top Five of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is returning (finally!) on the 17th of July with an all-new third season. To celebrate the return what has become my favorite of the new Star Trek shows on Paramount+, I decided to create a list of my top five episodes from the first two seasons. Memento Mori After several episodes of hinting at their presence, Memento Mori is the first big confrontation between the Federation and the Gorn. First introduced in the TOS episode Arena , with a memorable fight between Captain Kirk and a slow moving, green-skinned humanoid lizard, the Gorn have popped up in the episode The Time Trap of ST: The Animated Series , and in the In A Mirror, Darkly Part Two episode of ST: Enterprise (using really bad CGI that wasn’t much of an improvement over the Gorn suit used in Arena ). We never actually see the Gorn in Memento Mori , except for their ships, which look like angry claws ripping their way through space. This is a wise move, because not showing the...
Post a Comment
Read more