ILM’s Ben Snow has come full circle. After serving as a young artist on Jan de Bont’s “Twister during the early days of digital in 1996, the VFX vet returned as production supervisor on Lee Isaac Chung’s “Twisters” with a full CG arsenal at his disposal. “The original film was a tough show,” he told IndieWire.
“We were inventing a lot of the technology and didn’t really know what we were doing. And so I think it’s really good to be able to come back and revisit it with a modern toolset.” What director Chung envisioned for his update, which concerns the rivalry between tornado chasers Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Tyler (Glen Powell) during Oklahoma’s most destructive season, was making the CG tornadoes terrifying forces of nature with individual characteristics.
This impressionistic approach was important in charting Kate’s emotional arc during her redemptive mission to tame these monsters through a combination of intuition and science. “It was really important for Isaac Chung to identify them,” Snow said. “We went through some hero frames for what each one would look like.
Also some video clips of different beats that we wanted because one of the advantages that we have today is so much footage on YouTube. So we took the stills and the reference clips that Isaac had given us and talked about what the character of each tornado would be. We had a pretty big animation team on the show, and we started with what the tornado would look like, and th.