All the tornadoes in Twisters were inspired by at least one real-life tornado and were created for the film using a combination of practical special effects and digital visual effects. So how did they go about creating twisters for Twisters?
There are six tornado sequences in Twisters, but more than ten tornadoes were designed for the film, because one tornado has a twin and another ultimately begets several more. The filmmakers’ cache of reference material included original footage of super-cell clouds and real tornadoes that was filmed for the production by its technical consultants, most notably, professional storm-chaser Sean Casey. “Sean Casey’s work added a whole additional layer of realism to the film,” says exec producer Thomas Hayslip. “Sean’s an expert at how to approach a storm and then how to capture it visually, so we hired him to track storms. He’d go out and capture as much real footage, using handheld and mounted cameras and drones. His work provided visual effects with actual visual assets for their tornado-making work. It’s always much better to start from something real and be able augment that than to just create it from nothing.”
The finale tornado was inspired by three different tornadoes: 1) a wedge-shaped tornado, wider than tall, that rolled through Kansas in 2023, captured on film by the storm chasers employed by the production; 2) a tornado that touched down in the real El Reno in 2013 and evolved into a violent, multi-vortex twister, with wind speeds of 306 miles per hour, and at one point, a base of 2.6 miles wide; and 3) a tornado that struck Mayfield, Kentucky, in December of 2021, killing 76 people. “There’s an eerie, heartbreaking photo that was taken from inside a movie theater in Mayfield, showing how the tornado had destroyed the screen wall, revealing the wrecked town outside,” Chung says. “That photo became a symbolic touchstone for the production; we wanted the movie to honor all the meanings and feelings in that image.”
In charge of producing and creating twisters for the film’s practical, on-set tornado effects—e.g. wind, rain, hail, flying debris—was Academy Award® winning special effects supervisor SCOTT R. FISHER, whose work on Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar and Tenet won him his pair of Oscars®. Fisher also earned an Emmy for his contributions to The Book of Boba Fett.
- Producing high-impact wind was his first and highest priority with Twisters. “We wanted to maximize that as much as possible,” Fisher says. “We got as many Hollywood wind-producing machines as possible. But we also wanted to ratchet it up a bit, so we purchased two jet engines to generate more powerful effects for scenes where we’re destroying sets or blowing debris around. We ran the conventional fans at three-quarter throttle, about 70 miles per hour. With the jet engines, we situated them further away from the sets and ran them at 170-to-180 miles per hour.”
- In addition to dump tanks (including a 10,000-gallon behemoth for one catastrophic sequence), high-pressure pneumatic water cannons were used to generate water effects. “We used those on the actors,” Fisher says. “We could aim those more carefully so we just miss them or hit them at their feet.”
- The bullet-like hail in Twisters was created using polyacrylamide, a rubbery water-soluble polymer that resembles ice, but it’s softer, so it doesn’t hurt as much as ice does when it hits flesh. Additionally, about 15 tons of real ice were used as hail on the exterior vehicle work. “Luckily for us, the actors were game for everything we quite literally threw at them, whether it was dropping a soda machine from a crane or tree leaves moving at 100 miles per hour,” Fisher says. “We pushed the limits to create crazy-violent tornado moments and they were total troopers.”
The crucial job of making the tornadoes for Twisters fell to another franchise OG, visual effects supervisor BEN SNOW. Just as production designer Patrick Sullivan got his Hollywood start on Twister, Snow began his nearly 30-year career at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) working on the 1996 film. Since then, he’s earned four Oscar® nominations for his contributions to Pearl Harbor, Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, Iron Man and Iron Man 2.
….And that’s how they went about creating twisters for Twisters!
related feature : Director Jan De Bont talks special effects on the first Twister film
related feature : The Twisters screening ! – Give us a follow!
