This article was taken from the August 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
When it comes to weather, Hollywood typically values carnage over climate science (see Sharknado).
For Into the Storm however, director Steven Quale didn't want the perfect storm but an accurate one. "I didn't want to do a super-stylised film that had ridiculous tornadoes," says Quale, whose effects background includes working as James Cameron's second unit director on Titanic and Avatar.
So Quale consulted a UCLA climate professor about the specifics of tornado intensity, and meteorologists, who kept the film's weather systems grounded in reality. Mostly though, he consulted YouTube. "Twenty years ago, you had to have somebody with a camera being at the right place at the right time," he says. "Now we have people with camera phones taping these events as they are occurring. We actually based all of our tornados on YouTube footage."
The resulting thriller, which follows an American town being ravaged by twisters, includes a realistic array of Mother Nature's finest: from rope tornadoes ("really tall, thin and very fast," says Quale), to wedge tornadoes ("up to three kilometres wide, picking up wind speeds of 480kph in the centre"), to fire tornadoes ("actually very beautiful, but deadly").
To create the storms, the crew first rigged the set with propane fire bars -- "you get a flame that goes up six metres," says Quale -- and vast wind machines. "The actors were subjected to 160kph fans blowing debris," he laughs. "I learned that you can blow wind in somebody's face or you can have rain pouring down, but the minute you combine the two, suddenly those raindrops are projectiles. It feels like needles hitting you in the face." Visual effects artists then whipped up the final storms, and digitally added thousands of pieces of extra debris from trees and rubble to jumbo jets. The result, he says, is still carnage -- but destruction that is "as believable as possible".
Into the Storm is out on August 22.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
