Since working on the original “Twister” in 1996, VFX supervisor Ben Snow has earned four Oscar nominations for his contributions to fantastical projects including “Iron Man” and “Star Wars: Episode 2 — Attack of the Clones.” But when he oversaw visual effects for this summer’s hit disaster movie “Twisters” (starring Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell), that particular F-word never entered the conversation. Taking his cue from director Lee Isaac Chung, Snow and his Industrial Light & Magic team ditched over-the-top fantasy to make the tornadoes of Oklahoma look as real as possible.
“We found that it was better not to push the environment too much,” Snow says. “We talked about possibly doing a surreal yellow, almost postapocalyptic look, but it just had this artificiality that we didn’t like, so we leaned into real photography as a starting point.” Speaking from his vacation in Kyoto, Japan, Snow talked to The Envelope about teaming with storm chasers and data wranglers to craft the look of havoc-wreaking weather.
These are harrowing times when it comes to extreme weather. How did you use computers to generate such realistic tornadoes? We sent out storm chasers who actually ran into the weather and shot very high-resolution motion picture footage. That gave us the ability to study tornadoes in a lot more detail than we ever had before.
We also had a stills guy, Giles Hancock, who took high-resolution [photo] sets of storm clouds. If we were shooting.
