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SCIFI.COM Member neo8 asks:
 Will the scenes with [Spacing Guild Ambassador] Edric in his tank be in the miniseries?
 Yes, they will.
Bringing Edric to the screen was a challenge. The original Frank Herbert's Dune miniseries used a puppet for its one Spacing Guild scene. Director David Lynch also used a puppet for the Guild Navigators in his 1984 feature-film version of Dune. For Children of Dune, Ambassador Edric of the Spacing Guild was required to talk and move more extensively. He needed to interact with our cast, and his tank had to move unassisted across the sets.
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Spacing Guild Ambassador Edric was created using state-of-the-art digital imaging.
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I kept seeing Edric almost like a mermaid, with arm movements like treading water in the viscous Spice gas. There needed to be something almost slow-motion and dreamy about his movements.
I explored using an actor, and I saw some designs for using prosthetics. Nothing came back as acceptable. It was "guy in a rubber suit" all over again. Edric needed to be magnificent, more evolved than a human. Another concern was that wires would not allow for the range of movement I desired for Edric — I was looking for a "swimming" effect. I made the big push to see if we had the resources to make Edric and his tank completely CGI [computer-generated imagery]. We did.
We wrestled back and forth with whether Edric should have a moving mouth or use telepathy. In order to keep the audience connected to him and feel something when his fate is revealed, I chose to give him a moving mouth. The big advantage to that choice was that it made him more interactive.
The final CGI of Edric is good, but I wish we had had more time to explore his personality and refine his animation. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers raised the bar in 2002 with its CGI depiction of Gollum. I am curious how Edric will hold up to that level of realism, both in his interactions and in his texture.
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