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StyleArts & Entertainments Power The Media Fashion Of Interest
StyleArts & Entertainments Power The Media Fashion Of Interest


THE TWISTERS IN ‘TWISTERS’ ARE TERRIFYING. HOW’D THEY DO IT?


THE CREW HURLED AN ACTUAL HORSE TRAILER, ANIMATED SCIENTIFICALLY ACCURATE
TORNADOES AND HAD TO STOP FILMING WHEN A REAL-LIFE STORM WRECKED A SET.

9 min
36
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(Video: Universal Pictures)
By Sonia Rao
August 8, 2024 at 8:00 a.m. EDT

Back in May, about two months before the release of “Twisters,” star Glen Powell
said that the blockbuster-to-be had about 1,000 special effects to go.

It turns out 1,000 effects isn’t all that many. It took a small army of visual
effects experts — packing millions and millions of pixels into every frame and
working with practical effects makers on set — to create the stunning tornadoes
that rip through “Twisters,” including the jaw-dropper toward the end that
nearly annihilates the town of El Reno, Okla.


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PROCESS

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How do you play God with an act of God? With a grin. Director Lee Isaac Chung,
visual effects supervisor Ben Snow, production designer Patrick Sullivan, and
supervising sound editors Al Nelson and Bjorn Ole Schroeder recently said they
had a blast making “Twisters” — from the real-life rodeo they hired and the
vending machines and horse trailers they dropped from the sky to the delicate
behind-the-scenes postproduction work that makes the movie a visual marvel.
Here, step by step, is how they did it.




STEP 1: ASSEMBLE THE TEAM

As in “Twister,” Jan de Bont’s 1996 film starring Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton,
“Twisters” follows storm chasers in Oklahoma (Powell, Daisy Edgar-Jones and
Anthony Ramos, among others). The film brought back members of the original
crew, including Sullivan, who “couldn’t watch anyone else do this movie,” and
Snow, who had to be convinced (the original “Twister” was “quite a stressful,
tricky production”).

Digitally animating tornadoes was so difficult back then, he said, that producer
Steven Spielberg looked into making a convincing twister without computers.
(That was a no.) In the end, Snow signed on for the sequel because of Chung’s
vision. The director had scoured the web for reference images of real storms and
presented Snow with footage from storm chasers who, like Powell’s character,
posted it to YouTube. Chung was confident and clear-eyed. He could lead the
team.




STEP 2: CREATE THE STORMS

Some real-world research went into digitally animating those storms. “We
actually sent out storm chasers to get footage for us … that we could parse out
and figure out how to translate into VFX,” Chung said.

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The production team met with the National Weather Service and brought on
Oklahoma meteorologist Kevin Kelleher, who had consulted on “Twister.” His
advice even shaped tasks like animating moisture, down to the specific way
sunlight hits drops of water in the atmosphere. The film boasts “the
truest-to-science storms that anyone will be able to see rendered on a big
screen,” Chung said.

The tornadoes were created using “a complex fluid dynamic system,” Snow said —
basically, almost unfathomably involved computer animation. His team divided the
fictional world into “little cubes of three-dimensional specks” called voxels,
or volumetric pixels. Each voxel required its own calculation determining where
and how it appeared. “To get something that has the visual complexity you want —
of clouds and the vapor that makes up a tornado — you need millions and millions
of them,” Snow said.

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“Twisters” kicks off with a deadly EF5 tornado, which Chung wanted to foreshadow
with glimpses of dark skies and rolling clouds. The storm needed to be “chasing”
the characters, Snow said. “Something’s behind them, but you can’t see it. The
boogeyman is back in the mist.” As the movie begins, the audience feels the
tension of an encroaching disaster.

Then, wham! The EF5 whirls through. They shot the actors running out of their
car to seek shelter under an overpass. Crew members on set blew smoke and rain
close to the camera so it could be seen on the actors’ bodies, and Snow’s team
added even more mist later “using a combination of particle systems and little
tiny bits of cloudlike stuff we can generate on the computer,” he said.




STEP 3: PERFECT THE SOUND

The team did very little rerecording of dialogue after the film shoot — among
the bits was Edgar-Jones screaming while her character clings onto an overpass,
said Nelson, one of the supervising sound editors.

Each of the six tornadoes in the film has its own sonic personality. The first
and final storms are presented as killers, and the team layered a low, throbbing
pulse onto the audio track to contribute a sense of menace. Nelson created the
sound by manipulating recordings of a commuter train he once rode in Sweden. It
made a “thump thump thump” sound while moving through tunnels.

“It’s about imagining what you want to hear, and then using sounds from the real
world to help articulate that,” he said. “Then you upload it all together in the
same way you put a recipe together.”

Nelson keeps a library of sounds. For “Twisters,” he turned to the recordings of
wind he captured during a tropical storm while on vacation. That was as close as
the team got to recording real weather. “No actual tornado was recorded for this
movie,” said Schroeder, also a supervising sound editor.




STEP 4: WRECK A RODEO

Powell’s character takes Edgar-Jones’s to a rodeo to show her the fun side of
Oklahoma — only for tornado sirens to blare. The ensuing panic is palpable.

Chung leaned on practical effects as much as possible. He referred to Casey
O’Neill, the second-unit director, as a “master of horse work,” noting that they
had hired a rodeo for the scene but worked with separate animals for the stunts.
As the horses gallop away, the wind blows all sorts of debris into the crowd.
“We had a bunch of special effects guys on top of the stands, I’d say five
stories high, just pumping leaves out,” Chung said.

Some moments were rendered on computers for the sake of safety. Snow’s team
animated the stand falling apart, as well as the nearby tornado siren falling
off its pole.

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The main characters seek refuge at a motel across the street. It was a real
location, which meant the production couldn’t mess with it. But Sullivan, the
production designer, did build an extra office and a concrete pool. “I had my
playground,” Sullivan said. “We were able to come in and wreck it all.”

The characters hide in the pool. The plan was to drop an actual vending machine
into the concrete structure near the hotel manager, but it ended up looking
“like the actor was getting crushed under the Coke machine — and story-wise,
that just didn’t work for us,” Chung said. So the teams worked together. They
shot the machine falling with the actors in sight, and then dropped it again —
in a slightly different, better location — without the actors present. Then “we
combined it in post,” Snow said.

After the vending machine, a massive horse trailer lands in the pool. (The
horror never ends!)

“That was actually dropped,” Sullivan said. “When the guy got pulled out from
the pool [and sucked into the storm], that was on a cable. After that, he became
a CGI character.”




STEP 5: MAKE IT THROUGH A HISTORIC STRIKE

Production halted in July 2023 when the Screen Actors Guild went on strike. The
strike lasted for 118 days, making it the longest work stoppage in the union’s
history. The “Twisters” team was in the middle of shooting the rodeo sequence
when the strike began. Upon returning to Oklahoma in December, they faced
unexpected obstacles. Where, for instance, would they find more green leaves in
winter?

“Even some of the debris out there was slippery because it would get a coating
of water that would freeze a little bit” in the cold air, Sullivan said. And yet
the actors had to continue wearing summer clothing. Chilling, in more ways than
one.




STEP 6: DESTROY A MOVIE THEATER

Before they shot the climactic sequence in downtown El Reno, a real storm blew
in and wrecked the set. “We were all stuck inside, cowering in shop fronts on
either side of the farmers market, watching the set be destroyed in exactly the
way we wanted it to be destroyed for the film,” Snow said. “But ironically,
because of safety concerns, we weren’t able to go out there and film.”

When the storm passed, everyone pitched in to get the set back in order “so we
could go back in with the actors, and [special effects supervisor] Scott Fisher
could turn on his giant wind fans and destroy the site — again — while the film
camera was going,” Snow said.

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Fisher positioned two jet engine fans far enough away from the set to blow wind
at rates of 170 to 180 mph, according to production notes. (Regular fans were
also positioned closer to the actors, set to about 70 mph.) El Reno residents
whisked away by the winds were played by stuntpeople on ropes. Fisher’s team
used dump tanks to release tons of water at once, washing the actors down the
street. “We added some additional water in computer graphics,” Snow said.

Chung often gave the actors earplugs that were edited out in post. “I had heard
on the original ‘Twister’ that some of the actors had a hard time physically
with what they were forced to do,” Chung said, then joking: “I certainly didn’t
want to have these actors writing articles about me 10 years from now. So I
tried to be careful.”

Shooting some of the El Reno sequence on a soundstage allowed the team more
creative control. Sullivan built a movie theater based on a real structure in
the city, then took it apart. “You’re conscious of the footage of film that’s
being run through the cameras constantly,” he said. “There’s the pressure to get
it right the first or second time.” They dropped a big chunk of the ceiling a
few times, resetting it each time by hoisting it up on motors. The storm also
rips off the movie theater screen, a practical effect Sullivan and his team
executed only once.

Working on “Twisters” required great stamina and meticulous planning. Shooting
on film, a limited resource, only made it harder. And yet —

“It was the biggest pleasure of my career,” Sullivan said. “I joke that I can
retire now because I have my bookends. I have my ‘Twister’ and my ‘Twisters.’
It’s like, where do I go from here?”

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