How those ‘Twisters’ tornadoes got to look so real — and scary

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”, that particular F-word never entered the conversation. “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. We had to break that into little bricks of tornado where the tool would simulate one chunk and then tell the next chunk, “This is what happened.” All the adjoining components worked as a continuous result making sure the particles they were simulating went to the right place. One tornado in “Twisters” probably took as much computing power as we used to make the whole of the first “Twister.” It’s crazy.