Little Schmidt Productions Archive
Dune:
Prophecy
HBO Original Series · Season One
Before the legend, power was already being shaped in the shadows.
The Production
Overview
The Story
Dune: Prophecy travels roughly 10,000 years before the rise of Paul Atreides to an era when the institutions that will eventually define the Dune universe are still being formed, challenged and weaponised.
At the centre of the story are sisters Valya and Tula Harkonnen. Their family name carries the damage of an old political disgrace, but Valya refuses to accept the position history has assigned to them. Within the Sisterhood, she sees a route not merely to survival but to influence over the future of the Imperium.
The Sisterhood trains women to master observation, physical discipline, truth-reading and political strategy. Its ambitions reach directly into the great houses, where carefully placed advisers can shape decisions without occupying the throne themselves. The order is not yet the Bene Gesserit known from the later Dune story; Season One explores the dangerous process through which that power begins to take form.
Decades after Valya’s early promise to Mother Superior Raquella, the Sisterhood is attempting to place one of its own close to Imperial power. Emperor Javicco Corrino is trying to maintain political stability through the proposed marriage of his daughter Princess Ynez, while Empress Natalya views the forces surrounding the throne with increasing suspicion.
The arrival of Desmond Hart, a soldier who claims to have survived an encounter on Arrakis that should have killed him, disrupts Valya’s carefully constructed plans. His apparent abilities introduce a threat that cannot be understood through the Sisterhood’s usual systems of information and control.
Running beneath the political struggle is another conflict fundamental to this period of Dune history: humanity has recently emerged from war against thinking machines. Technology capable of imitating the human mind is forbidden, yet the temptation to preserve and secretly use it has not disappeared.
The series therefore approaches Dune from a different angle to the feature films. Rather than beginning with Arrakis and the Atreides family, it examines the creation of institutions, bloodlines and methods of influence whose consequences will still be visible thousands of years later.
A Different Dune
Building the history behind the mythology.
The creative opportunity in Dune: Prophecy is unusual: the series has to feel unmistakably connected to the Dune screen universe while depicting civilisation thousands of years before the characters, architecture and political structures audiences already recognise.
Power Before Paul
The story shifts attention from a single prophetic hero to institutions learning how to influence emperors, bloodlines and history over generations.
The Sisterhood
The Bene Gesserit are presented not as an ancient certainty but as an organisation still developing its philosophy, methods and internal loyalties.
A Younger Imperium
Every palace, school, spacecraft and political ritual has to suggest a civilisation that belongs to Dune while existing at a much earlier point in its history.
The Ensemble
Main Cast
The first season moves between the Sisterhood and the Imperial court, with the Harkonnen sisters at the centre of a struggle over who will shape the future of the Imperium.
Emily Watson
Mother Superior Valya HarkonnenThe formidable leader of the Sisterhood. Valya believes the order must acquire enough influence to guide humanity’s future, and she is prepared to use political strategy, secrecy and extraordinary personal discipline to achieve it.
Olivia Williams
Reverend Mother Tula HarkonnenValya’s sister and one of the Sisterhood’s most important figures. Tula’s quieter manner conceals a history of difficult choices, divided loyalties and consequences that reach directly into the order’s future.
Travis Fimmel
Desmond HartA soldier who returns from Arrakis with a mysterious past and an apparent power that threatens the Sisterhood’s influence. His arrival destabilises the political plan surrounding the Imperial family.
Jodhi May
Empress NatalyaThe Empress of the Imperium and wife of Javicco Corrino. Natalya becomes increasingly resistant to the political forces attempting to shape her family and the throne.
Mark Strong
Emperor Javicco CorrinoThe ruler of the Imperium, balancing dynastic pressure, military concerns and a politically valuable marriage for his daughter while rival advisers compete for influence around him.
Sarah-Sofie Boussnina
Princess YnezHeir to the Golden Lion Throne. Ynez stands at the intersection of Imperial succession and the Sisterhood’s long-term plans, making her education and proposed marriage politically consequential.
Behind the Production
A civilisation
built by hand.
Season One was based primarily in Budapest and relied heavily on constructed environments. That physical approach gave the Imperial palaces, Sisterhood spaces and planetary interiors a material presence while visual effects extended the scale beyond what could exist on a stage.
A major production base for the Dune universe.
Budapest provided the production infrastructure for Season One, continuing Hungary’s connection with the screen world of Dune. Large stage environments allowed the series to create recurring locations that could be controlled in detail rather than relying entirely on virtual backgrounds.
Architecture had to carry thousands of years of history.
Production designer Tom Meyer’s team created environments for the Sisterhood, Imperial household and multiple planetary cultures. Stone, wood, metal, monumental proportions and highly controlled decorative detail help the world feel inherited rather than newly manufactured.
The design problem was not simply to make the future look advanced. It was to suggest societies already surrounded by history.
Scale without losing intimacy.
The series repeatedly places private conversations inside immense rooms. Cinematography therefore has to preserve architectural scale while keeping political manoeuvring readable through faces, distance and movement.
That tension is particularly important for a story in which a quiet conversation can have consequences across the Imperium.
Little Schmidt Productions
Production
Contribution.
Productions operating at this scale depend on the coordination of environments, access, local production knowledge and the practical requirements that sit behind the finished frame. Little Schmidt Productions contributed location and wider production support within that broader process.
Every world begins with a practical production question.
Even when a science-fiction environment will ultimately be transformed by design and visual effects, its production requirements remain physical. Location work considers access, unit scale, technical needs, movement and how a space can support the visual intention of a scene.
Supporting a series moving between worlds.
Dune: Prophecy shifts rapidly between the Sisterhood, Imperial spaces, Harkonnen history and different planetary cultures. Production coordination helps separate creative environments function inside one demanding shooting schedule.
A location is shared by every department.
What works visually must also work for camera, lighting, art, costume, transport, unit movement and performers. Production support sits at the intersection of those needs, helping the environment remain usable once the full production arrives.
Invisible support behind visible scale.
The finished series is designed to make the audience think about empires, planets and dynasties rather than production logistics. That illusion depends on detailed work behind the camera — the practical layer that allows ambitious screen worlds to exist consistently from scene to scene.
Inside the Production
Designing a past
that still feels futuristic.
The production’s most interesting visual problem was chronological. It could not simply copy the films: this civilisation exists roughly ten millennia earlier. But if it moved too far away from their design language, it would stop feeling like Dune.
The series is a prequel set in the future — which means its designers had to invent the ancient history of a world that has not happened yet.
The Sisterhood needed architecture for discipline, not luxury.
The Sisterhood’s environments communicate institutional control. Repetition, symmetry, long corridors and restrained material choices make the school feel like a place where individual identity is being trained into collective purpose.
Its spaces are impressive, but their authority comes from order rather than Imperial display.
The palace tells a different story.
Imperial environments use scale ceremonially. Large chambers, long approaches and carefully staged positions turn architecture into hierarchy: who stands close to the Emperor, who waits at a distance and who is allowed into private rooms all become part of the political language.
Forbidden technology could not look ordinary.
The story takes place after humanity’s war against thinking machines, so advanced technology carries political and moral meaning. When prohibited machine intelligence appears, its design must feel desirable enough to explain why people still preserve it and dangerous enough to justify the taboo surrounding it.
Before Giedi Prime became the image audiences know.
The series encounters House Harkonnen at a radically different point in its history. That allows costume, architecture and family spaces to explore humiliation, memory and social decline rather than simply repeating the severe industrial identity associated with the house thousands of years later.
One universe cannot mean one visual culture.
The Imperium contains planets shaped by different climates, histories and ruling families. Production design therefore uses materials, silhouettes, decoration and spatial organisation to distinguish societies while maintaining an underlying Dune vocabulary.
The viewer should be able to feel that the worlds belong to the same civilisation without believing they were designed by the same people.
The most powerful details are the ones that survive history.
Names such as Harkonnen, Atreides and Corrino immediately carry meaning for audiences familiar with Dune. Prophecy uses that knowledge carefully: familiar institutions appear in less familiar forms, allowing viewers to recognise the beginnings of ideas that will eventually become tradition.
That is the production’s distinctive world-building achievement — not recreating Dune, but creating a believable earlier layer underneath it.
Expanding the Universe
Dune beyond
the Atreides story.
The first season demonstrated that the screen universe could move thousands of years away from Paul Atreides and still remain recognisably Dune by concentrating on the forces that shape history: institutions, family memory, technology, religion and political power.
Long before the Bene Gesserit became a legend, the Sisterhood had to decide what it was willing to become.
Mythology becomes human history.
Ideas that appear ancient and almost immutable in the later Dune timeline are shown here as decisions made by individuals. That shift gives familiar mythology a political and personal origin.
A new visual chapter earned recognition.
The first season’s production design was recognised during the 2025 awards cycle, reflecting the scale of the work required to create new worlds while maintaining continuity with an already distinctive screen universe.
The story expands beyond Season One.
HBO renewed Dune: Prophecy for a second season. Production on the eight-episode follow-up began in 2025, extending the series into Hungary, Jordan and Spain and broadening the geographic scale of its screen world.