By TREVOR HOGG Denis Villeneuve (Dune: Part Two) finds the difficulty of working with visual effects are sometimes the intermediaries between him and the artists and therefore the need to be precise with directions to keep things on track. (Image courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures) If post-production has any chance of going smoothly, there must be a solid on-set relationship between the director, cinematographer and visual effects supervisor. “It’s my job to have a vision and to bring it to the screen,” notes Denis Villeneuve, director of Dune: Part Two. “That’s why working with visual effects requires a lot of discipline. It’s not like you work with a keyboard and can change your mind all the time. When I work with a camera, I commit to a mise-en-scène. I’m trying to take the risk, move forward in one direction and enhance it with visual effects. I push it until it looks perfect. It takes a tremendous amount of time and preparation. [VFX Supervisor] Paul Lambert is a perfectionist, and I love that about him. We will never put a shot on the screen that we don’t feel has a certain level of quality. It needs to look as real as the face of my actor.” A legendary cinematographer had a significant influence on how Villeneuve approaches digital augmentation. “Someone I have learned a lot from about visual effects is [Cinematographer] Roger Deakins. I remember that at the beginning, when I was doing Blade Runner 2049, some artwork was not defined enough, and I was like, ‘I will correct that later.’ Roger said, ‘No. Don’t do that. You have to make sure right at the start.’ I’ve learned the hard way that you need to be as precise as you can, otherwise it goes in a lot of directions.” Motion capture is visually jarring because your eye is always drawn to the performer in the mocap suit, but it worked out well on Better Man because the same thing happens when he gets replaced by a CG monkey. (Image courtesy of Paramount Pictures) Visual effects enabled the atmospherics on Wolfs to be art directed, which is not always possible with practical snow. (Image courtesy of Apple Studios) One of the most complex musical numbers in Better Man is “Rock DJ,” which required LiDAR scans of Regent Street and doing full 3D motion capture with the dancers dancing down the whole length of the street to work out how best to shoot it. (Image courtesy of Paramount Pictures) Cinematographer Dan Mindel favors on-set practical effects because the reactions from the cast come across as being more genuine, which was the case for Twisters. (Image courtesy of Universal Pictures) Storyboards are an essential part of the planning process. “When I finish a screenplay, the first thing I do is to storyboard, not just to define the visual element of the movie, but also to rewrite the movie through images,” Villeneuve explains. “Those storyboards inform my crew about the design, costumes, accessories and vehicles, and [they] create a visual inner rhythm of the film. This is the first step towards visual effects where there will be a conversation that will start from the boards. That will be translated into previs to help the animators know where we are going because the movie has to be made in a certain timeframe and needs choreography to make sure everybody is moving in the same direction.” The approach towards filmmaking has not changed over the years. “You have a camera and a couple of actors in front of you, and it’s about finding the right angle; the rest is noise. I try to protect the intimacy around the camera as much as possible and focus on that because if you don’t believe the actor, then you won’t believe anything.” Before transforming singer Robbie Williams into a CG primate, Michael Gracey started as a visual effects artist. “I feel so fortu- nate to have come from a visual effects background early on in my career,” recalls Michael Gracey, director of Better Man. “I would sit down and do all the post myself because I didn’t trust anyone to care as much as I did. Fortunately, over the years I’ve met people who do. It’s a huge part of how I even scrapbook ideas together. Early on, I was constantly throwing stuff up in Flame, doing a video test and asking, ‘Is this going to work?’ Jumping into 3D was something I felt comfortable doing. I’ve been able to plan out or previs ideas. It’s an amazing tool to be armed with if you are a director and have big ideas and you’re trying to convey them to a lot of people.” Previs was pivotal in getting Better Man financed. “Off the page, people were like, ‘Is this monkey even going to work?’ Then they were worried that it wouldn’t work in a musical number. We showed them the previs for Feel, the first musical number, and My Way at the end of the film. I would say, ‘If you get any kind of emotion watching these musical numbers, just imagine what it’s going to be like when it’s filmed and is photoreal.” Several shots had to be stitched together to create a ‘oner’ that features numerous costume changes and 500 dancers. “For Rock DJ, we were doing LiDAR scans of Regent Street and full 3D motion capture with the dancers dancing down the whole length of the street to work out all of the transition points and how best to shoot it,” Gracey states. “That process involved Erik Wilson, the Cinematographer; Luke Millar, the Visual Effects Supervisor; Ashley Wallen, the Choreographer; and Patrick Correll, Co-Producer. Patrick would sit on set and, in DaVinci Resolve, take the feed from the camera and check every take against the blueprint that we had already previs.” Motion capture is visually jarring to shoot. “Everything that is in-camera looks perfect, then a guy walks in wearing a mocap suit and your eye zooms onto him. But the truth is, your eye does that the moment you replace him with a monkey as well. It worked out quite well because that idea is true to what it is to be famous. A famous person walks into the room and your eye immediately goes to them.” Digital effects have had a significant impact on a particular area of filmmaking. “Physical effects were a much higher art form than it is now, or it was allowed to be then than it is now,” notes Dan Mindel, Cinematographer on Twisters. “People will decline a real pyrotechnic explosion and do a digital one. But you get a much bigger reaction when there’s actual noise and flash.” It is all about collaboration. Mindel explains, “The principle that I work with is that the visual effects department will make us look great, and we have to give them the raw materials in the best possible form so they can work with it instinctually. Sometimes, as a DP, you might want to do something different, but the bottom line is, you’ve got to listen to these guys, because they know what they want. It gets a bit dogmatic, but most of the time, my relationship with visual effects is good, and especially the guys who have had a foot in the analog world at one point or another and have transitioned into the digital world. When we made Twister, it was an analog movie with digital effects, and it worked great. That’s because everyone on set doing the technical work understood both formats, and we were able to use them well.” Digital filmmaking has caused a generational gap. “The younger directors don’t think holistically,” Mindel notes. “It’s much more post-driven because they want to manipulate on the Avid or whatever platform it is going to be. What has happened is that the overreaching nature of these tools has left very little to the imagination. A movie that is heavy visual effects is mostly conceptualized on paper using computer-generated graphics and color; that insidiously sneaks into the look and feel of the movie before you know it. You see concept art blasted all over production offices. People could get used to looking at those images, and before you know it, that’s how the movie looks. That’s a very dangerous place to be, not to have the imagination to work around an issue that perhaps doesn’t manifest itself until you’re shooting.” There has to be a sense of purpose. Mindel remarks, “The ability to shoot in a way that doesn’t allow any manipulation in post is the only way to guarantee that there’s just one direction the look can go in. But that could be a little dangerous for some people. Generally, the crowd I’m working with is part of a team, and there’s little thought of taking the movie to a different place than what was shot. I work in the DI with the visual effects supervisor, and we look at our work together so we’re all in agreement that it fits into the movie.” “All of the advances in technology are a push for greater control,” notes Larkin Seiple, Cinematographer on Everything Everywhere All at Once. “There are still a lot of things that we do with visual effects that we could do practically, but a lot of times it’s more efficient, or we have more attempts at it later in post, than if we had tried to do it practically. I find today, there’s still a debate about what we do on set and what we do later digitally. Many directors have been trying to do more on set, and the best visual effects supervisors I work with push to do everything in-camera as much as possible to make it as realistic as possible.” Storytelling is about figuring out where to invest your time and effort. Seiple states, “I like the adventure of filmmaking. I prefer to go to a mountain top and shoot some of the scenes, get there and be inspired, as opposed to recreate it. Now, if it’s a five-second cutaway, I don’t want production to go to a mountain top and do that. For car work, we’ll shoot the real streets, figure out the time of day and even light the plates for it. Then, I’ll project those on LED walls with actors in a car on a stage. I love doing that because then I get to control how that looks.” Visual effects have freed Fallout Cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh to shoot quicker and in places that in the past would have been deemed imperfect because of power lines, out-of-period buildings or the sky. (Image courtesy of Prime Video) Visual effects assist in achieving the desired atmospherics. Seiple says, “On Wolfs, we tried to bring in our own snow for every scene. We would shoot one take, the snow would blow left, and the next take would blow right. Janek Sirrs is probably the best visual effects supervisor I’ve worked with, and he was like, ‘Please turn off the snow. It’ll be a nightmare trying to remove the snow from all these shots then add our own snow back for continuity because you can’t have the snow changing direction every other cut.’ Or we’d have to ‘snow’ a street, which would take ages. Janek would say, ‘Let’s put enough snow on the ground to see the lighting on it and where the actors walk. We’ll do the rest of the street later because we have a perfect reference of what it should look like.” Certain photographic principles have to be carried over into post-production to make shots believable to the eye. Seiple explains, “When you make all these amazing details that should be out of focus sharper, then the image feels like a visual effect because it doesn’t work the way a lens would work.” Familiarity with the visual effects process is an asset in being able to achieve the best result. “I inadvertently come from a lot of visual effect-heavy shoots and shows, so I’m quick to have an opinion about it. Many directors love to reference the way David Fincher uses visual effects because there is such great behind-the-scenes imagery that showcases how they were able to do simple things. Also, I like to shoot tests even on an iPhone to see if this comp will work or if this idea is a good one.” Cinematographer Fabian Wagner and VFX Supervisor John Moffatt spent a lot of time in pre-production for Venom: The Last Dance discussing how to bring out the texture of the symbiote through lighting and camera angles. (Image courtesy of Columbia Pictures) Game of Thrones Director of Photography Fabian Wagner had to make key decisions while prepping and breaking down the script so visual effects had enough time to meet deadline. (Image courtesy of HBO) Twisters was an analog movie with digital effects that worked well because everyone on set doing the technical work understood both formats. (Image courtesy of Universal Pictures) For Cinematographer Larkin Seiple, storytelling is about figuring out where to invest your time and effort. Scene from the Netflix series Beef. (Image courtesy of Netflix) Cinematographer Larkin Seiple believes that all of the advances in technology are a push for greater control, which occurred on Everything Everywhere All at Once. (Image courtesy of A24) Nothing beats reality when it comes to realism. “Every project I do I talk more about the real elements to bring into the shoot than the visual effect element because the more practical stuff that you can do on set, the more it will embed the visual effects into the image, and, therefore, they’re more real,” observes Fabian Wagner, Cinematographer on Venom: The Last Dance. “It also depends on the job you’re doing in terms of how real or unreal you want it to be. Game of Thrones was a good example because it was a visual effects-heavy show, but they were keen on pushing the reality of things as much as possible. We were doing interactive lighting and practical on-set things to embed the visual effects. It was successful.” Television has a significantly compressed schedule compared to feature films. “There are fewer times to iterate. You have to be much more precise. On Game of Thrones, we knew that certain decisions had to be made early on while we were still prepping and breaking down the script. Because of their due dates, to be ready in time, they had to start the visual effects process for certain dragon scenes months before we even started shooting.” “Like everything else, it’s always about communication,” Wagner notes. “I’ve been fortunate to work with extremely talented and collaborative visual effects supervisors, visual effects producers and directors. I have become friends with most of those visual effects departments throughout the shoot, so it’s easy to stay in touch. Even when Venom: The Last Dance was posting, I would be talking to John Moffatt, who was our talented visual effects supervisor. We would exchange emails, text messages or phone calls once a week, and he would send me updates, which we would talk about it. If I gave any notes or thoughts, John would listen, and if it were possible to do anything about, he would. In the end, it’s about those personal relationships, and if you have those, that can go a long way.” Wagner has had to deal with dragons, superheroes and symbiotes. “They’re all the same to me! For the symbiote, we had two previous films to see what they had done, where they had succeeded and where we could improve it slightly. While prepping, John and I spent a lot of time talking about how to bring out the texture of the symbiote and help it with the lighting and camera angles. One of the earliest tests was to see what would happen if we backlit or side lit it as well as trying different textures for reflections. We came up with something we all were happy with, and that’s what we did on set. It was down to trying to speak the same language and aiming for the same thing, which in this case was, ‘How could we make the symbiote look the coolest?’” Visual effects has become a crucial department throughout the filmmaking process. “The relationship with the visual effects supervisor is new,” states Stuart Dryburgh, Cinematographer on Fallout. “We didn’t really have that. On The Piano, the extent of the visual effects was having somebody scribbling in a lightning strike over a stormy sky and a little flash of an animated puppet. Runaway Bride had a two-camera setup where one of the cameras pushed into the frame, and that was digitally removed, but we weren’t using it the way we’re using it now. For [the 2026 Netflix limited series] East of Eden, we’re recreating 19th and early 20th century Connecticut, Boston and Salinas, California in New Zealand. While we have some great sets built and historical buildings that we can use, there is a lot of set extension and modification, and some complete bluescreen scenes, which allow us to more realistically portray a historical environment than we could have done back in the day.” The presence of a visual effects supervisor simplified principal photography. Dryburgh adds, “In many ways, using visual effects frees you to shoot quicker and in places that might otherwise be deemed imperfect because of one little thing, whether it’s power lines or out-of-period buildings or sky. All of those can be easily fixed. Most of us have been doing it for long enough that we have a good idea of what can and can’t be done and how it’s done so that the visual effects supervisor isn’t the arbiter.” Lighting cannot be arbitrarily altered in post as it never looks right. “Whether you set the lighting on the set and the background artist has to match that, or you have an existing background and you, as a DP, have to match that – that is the lighting trick to the whole thing,” Dryburgh observes. “Everything has to be the same, a soft or hard light, the direction and color. Those things all need to line up in a composited shot; that is crucial.” Every director has his or her own approach to filmmaking. “Harold Ramis told me, ‘I’ll deal with the acting and the words. You just make it look nice, alright?’ That’s the conversation we had about shots, and it worked out well. [Director] Garth Davis, who I’m working with now, is a terrific photographer in his own right and has a great visual sense, so he’s much more involved in anything visual, whether it be the designs of the sets, creation of the visual effects, my lighting or choice of lenses. It becomes much more collaborative. And that applies to the visual effects department as well.” Recreating vintage lenses digitally is an important part of the visual aesthetic. “As digital photography has become crisper, better and sharper, people have chosen to use fewer perfect optics, such as lenses that are softer on the edges or give a flare characteristic. Before production, we have the camera department shoot all of these lens grids of different packages and ranges, and visual effects takes that information so they can model every lens. If they’re doing a fully CG background, they can apply that lens characteristic,” remarks Dryburgh. Television schedules for productions like House of the Dragon do not allow a lot of time to iterate, so decisions have to be precise. (Image courtesy of HBO) Bluescreen and stunt doubles on Twisters. (Image courtesy of Universal Pictures) “The principle that I work with is that the visual effects department will make us look great, and we have to give them the raw materials in the best possible form so they can work with it instinctually. Sometimes, as a DP, you might want to do something different, but the bottom line is, you’ve got to listen to these guys because they know what they want. It gets a bit dogmatic, but most of the time, my relationship with visual effects is good, and especially the guys who have had a foot in the analog world at one point or another and have transitioned into the digital world.” —Dan Mindel, Cinematographer, Twisters Cinematographers like Greig Fraser have adopted Unreal Engine. “Greig has an incredible curiosity about new technology, and that helped us specifically with Dune: Part Two,” Villeneuve explains. “Greig was using Unreal Engine to capture natural environments. For example, if we decide to shoot in that specific rocky area, we’ll capture the whole area with drones to recreate the terrain in the computer. If I said, ‘I want to shoot in that valley on November 3rd and have the sun behind the actors. At what time is it? You have to be there at 9:45 am.’ We built the whole schedule like a puzzle to maximize the power of natural light, but that came through those studies, which were made with the software usually used for video games.” Technology is essentially a tool that keeps evolving. Villeneuve adds, “Sometimes, I don’t know if I feel like a dinosaur or if my last movie will be done in this house behind the computer alone. It would be much less tiring to do that, but seriously, the beauty of cinema is the idea of bringing many artists together to create poetry.”

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Including, the fire-nado. An excerpt from issue #31 of befores & afters magazine. Replicating natural phenomena was ILM’s central task on Twisters. The visual effects studio would need to analyze the reference, then consider the science behind storms and tornadoes, and finally develop new tools for simulation and rendering to bring what were key ‘characters’ to life. The ILM Art Department also had an early role in crafting keyframe art to help visualize some of the more epic scenes in Twisters. Senior concept artist Brett Northcutt then continued the design process for specific tornadoes. “At first,” he says, “I wasn’t sure how much help I would be as there is a ton of amazing real storm chaser footage online. At that point, ILM visual effects supervisor Florian Witzel told me that director Lee Isaac Chung wanted each tornado to be like a monster, each with its own characteristics.  That really resonated with me as I could play with size, lighting and visibility for each tornado.” Concept art. “We also looked at a lot of real footage and I quickly learned how much variation they can have aesthetically,” adds Northcutt. “For scenes where our heroes are scientifically chasing storms we could use clarity and front lighting to show them as less threatening. However, for scenes where our heroes are in peril, we could backlight them or hide them in weather so the actual threat level wasn’t entirely clear.  The greatest movie monsters, like in Jaws or Alien, aren’t seen very clearly and are therefore much more scary.” ILM began the 3D tornado building process by breaking down the different elements that make up a storm and a tornado, while also giving distinct personalities to each of the ten tornadoes that appear in the film. This look and feel to the weather also came directly from the director, as production visual effects supervisor Ben Snow points out. “At the beginning we knew there were these six major sequences and that tornadoes went through different phases. I said to Isaac, ‘Look, I’d really like to get one or two key images from all of this amazing material that we’ve collected. Let’s just choose a couple of images for each tornado to get the character. So we went through and did that, and we ended up with a pretty good focused set of material.” Plate. Roto. Layout. Final. “In addition,” says Snow, “there were key beats in the film where Isaac would have looked at YouTube footage or footage from the storm-chasers, and he’d say, ‘This is the sort of feeling I want for this sequence, this is the quality of light I want. Not just for visual effects, but also for special effects and for the DP Dan Mindel and production designer Patrick Sullivan. Here are the key feelings I want, based on footage that we found.’” That gave Snow and the team at ILM two sets of creative inputs to start crafting the look of the storms and tornadoes, alongside the storm-chaser footage and the imagery produced by Giles Hancock. “What the VFX artists would have to do is start by trying to get it to match that reference and that look,” states Snow. “We ultimately had a development cycle for each tornado, with iterations. Even though we were using science and weather-based systems to do the simulations, there was still an artistic component to all this. We still got to sculpt, shape and add to them. And actually what that ended up giving us, too, was a library of clouds shapes and sky pieces and other parts of weather that could be combined together. I think it became key to both achieving realism and achieving the creative side to those tornadoes as well.” The outcome of this analysis of the tornadoes was a break-up of the general structure that needed to be depicted on screen. Tornadoes had a funnel, a thin layer of vapor surrounding the funnel, a debris field of dirt picked up from the ground, rigid debris objects and a shelf cloud connecting to the sky. “Our simulations are not just a tornado alone, there’s a lot more than that,” details ILM associate visual effects supervisors Charles Lai. “We have the wall cloud that connects from the top of the funnel to the sky, but that also has to be connected to the shelf cloud. So, we also built that shelf cloud, and that is moving a little bit slower, and that has to be connected to the HDRI panel that’s in the background. So, there’s a whole lot of little pieces that go into it. And then, not only are we simulating the tornado and those separate pieces, we’ve got a lot of ground effects that showcase that spiral inflow, and we pretty much had to do it for all our sequences.” “There’s so much more to it than just the tornadoes,” notes Witzel. “We’re essentially inside this dense soup of weather. There are varying levels of moisture and fine particulates in the air that diffuse the background, so you can’t just drop in an element and expect it to work. You constantly have to balance how the object or background is being affected and diffused. That was always an important thing to get right in each shot.” After the initial layout phase, the animation team was equipped with a flexible rig and toolset to define the base motion of each tornado. “The anim department blocked out the overall performance without breaking physical accuracy,” Witzel explains. “With the twin tornadoes, for instance, we could choreograph the timing and when they split apart. How they spiral around each other, how wide are they, how they relate to each other or how fast they move. All of these foundational choices help guide the simulation and effects teams. Once that framework is there, we hand it off to the fluid solver to do its simulation, and then you refine it from there.” “With the tornadoes, they were not always perfectly vertical,” adds Lai. “When you see these massive wedges on screen, you could believe, sure, it is just a massive vertical column. But, when we worked on some of the smaller tornadoes that were just trying to touch down, they often curved around and touched down. I think that’s where it was really valuable to be able to have the animation rigged that way and to show animatics in that form and just get quick buy-offs on, screen-space wise. It let us art direct them.” ILM used the latest iteration of its proprietary fluid solver, ILM Pyro, to simulate the tornadoes. “ILM Pyro started out several years ago as a wrapper around Houdini’s Pyro, just to make things easier for artists,” explains Witzel. “Over time, it evolved. Today its core is completely replaced with proprietary microsolvers and custom tools. The idea was always to create a system that gave artists both an easy entry point and deep artistic control.” With ILM Pyro, artists could manage a wide range of forces – as well as detailed emission and dissipation, pressure, buoyancy, gravity, and temperature bands – to sculpt the look and behavior of each tornado. The resulting velocity fields were then used to advect additional environmental effects like debris, smoke, and fire. “We’re essentially guiding the volumetrics,” says Witzel. “But when you do that, it’s easy to lose energy and detail. Other solvers can get soft and blurry very quickly. With ILM Pyro, we put a lot of emphasis on maintaining that energy. We use techniques like reflection solvers to preserve vorticity and confinement. It’s all about keeping the tornado’s energy and details alive.” The scale of the weather systems, especially supercells and the larger storm structures, often exceeded what a single simulation could handle efficiently. To manage this, ILM adopted a wedging workflow, splitting simulations into smaller blocks that were reassembled at render time. To retain fine detail, a secondary narrowband particle simulation was layered in, adding localized noise and complexity. “We’d run a core sim first,” Witzel explains, “then layer in another sim with added wavelet turbulence. Or we’d run a narrowband sim focused on the tornado’s edge, where the core was coarse, but the outer layers had much higher resolution.” Lighting the synthetic clouds proved compute-intensive, especially allocating for volumetric rendering time (rendering was generally handled in Mantra and Katana, with Katana XPU rendering done towards the end of production). To speed up the renders for clouds, ILM developed a workflow that pre-baked the light scatter on the clouds while being sampled directly at render time in the shader. This gave renders a six-time speed increase but preserved the desired look. One particular tornado seen in the film was unlike anything previously witnessed in Twister. This is the ‘fire-nado’ at the oil refinery. Snow worked directly with the previs team from The Third Floor, led by James Willingham III, on the refinery sequence. “We did a lot of work on what it was going to look like,” says Snow, “and we’d printed out little diagrams of what the imagined landscape might be like to take with us to Oklahoma. But we actually hadn’t come to a final agreement about what the scene should be.” The intervening Hollywood strikes in 2023 provided an opportunity to revisit the fire-nado sequence. “What we were trying to bring was a sense of mystery to the whole thing,” relates Snow. “We thought, let’s have them drive into a fog bank so they lose visibility, all of their GPS has gone out because of the storm, they don’t have knowledge that they’re next to this big refinery, which would make it more scary and creepy.” Anim. Creature dev. FX. Final. Owing to the time of the year that they could finally shoot the refinery scenes, the plates tended to be in bright daylight, necessitating a complex layering in of atmosphere and fog in visual effects. “One of our compositing supervisors, Ben O’Brien, came up with a really beautiful fire-lit fog look that we were able to bring into play in that end sequence.” Bluescreen photography for the sequence of the actors in their vehicles saw Scott Fisher fire off a series of pyro events for interactive lighting. “This really helped tie in the bluescreen plates to what we had filmed already,” notes Snow. “Scott also built these really cool rotisserie rigs and ways to flip the cars over with the actors inside that could then be dragged around, which happens in that storm.” Meanwhile, in the ILM Art Department, Brett Nortcutt worked with a 3D model of the refinery developed by model supervisor Bruce Holcomb to help art direct the scenes. “Even though the model was a work in progress, it was already an amazingly detailed model that I could start with,” notes Nortcutt. “For the low-angle image, I started with plate photography of the caravan on the road but ended up replacing everything but the road. The real challenge was showing a massive tornado interacting with an oil refinery as well as heavy fog. I imagined the wind forces of the tornado twisting and pulling apart the tanks and pipes of the oil refinery while also sucking fire and fog into its funnel. To add more chaos, I added sparks, explosions, and an indication of wind forces pulling everything into it across the terrain from the foreground.” “While I rendered Bruce’s 3D model of the refinery for these concepts,” continues Northcutt, “I knew that the only way I was going to be able to quickly create tornado variations for each concept was to digitally paint them. I developed a technique in Photoshop using three different brushes that allowed me to quickly vary the edges and thickness of each tornado. I then had great success adding a long exposure waterfall texture on top at a very low opacity that looked very similar to the texture of real tornadoes. It’s always fun to find something that you wouldn’t expect helps more than the real thing.” For the final fire-nado, the concept was that the nearby oil refinery accelerates the tornado, making it grow larger and more intense. “That meant,” says Witzel, “we had to layer in all kinds of elements. Crude oil fires, butane tanks exploding. We imagined a mix of chemicals being sucked into the atmosphere, creating this real Frankenstein’s monster of a storm. We had to build the entire refinery asset in detail, then destroy it, and on top of that, the whole scene was blanketed in fog. It was incredibly complex.” The post ‘Twisters’: what went into a storm appeared first on befores & afters.

Most of the first trailer for Ironheart reminds viewers of what we learned in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever: that Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) is a genius. Under pressure and threat of danger, she figures out a way to escape an elevator death trap, establishing her credibility as the greatest engineering mind since Tony Stark. But there’s one thing that Riri Williams has in common with most people, including those watching the trailer at home. As her friend puts it, “You know nothing about this man.” The man in question is Parker Robbins, played by Anthony Ramos. He appears in the trailer as a sort of morally dubious benefactor to Riri, but the most notable part of him is his unique style of dress. In most scenes, Robbins wears a leather cloak, which appears to have mystical powers. Marvel Comics readers (and Marvel Snap players) recognize Robbins as “The Hood,” a relative newcomer to the world of comics but a character with the power to shake up the MCU. Robbins made his debut in 2002’s The Hood, written by Brian K. Vaughan (Y: The Last Man, Saga) and penciled by Kyle Hotz. As part of Marvel’s mature-readers MAX line, The Hood took a sideways glance at the Peter Parker archetype, giving us a likable everyman who operated in the world of Marvel’s criminals. When Parker took a burglary job to pay for his sick mother’s treatment, he discovered a mystical cape and pair of boots, clothing that granted him the powers of flight and invisibility. While that initial story made Parker more of a normal guy who makes bad choices in difficult situations, subsequent tales have leaned into soap opera, transforming him into more of an unrepentant supervillain. In Daredevil, he sought to become the new Kingpin of Crime and he regularly butted heads with the New Avengers. During the Secret Invasion and Secret Wars storylines, Parker became a member of the Cabal, a sort of evil Illuminati, alongside villains such as Norman Osborn and Doctor Doom. Later, he joined the Thunderbolts and clashed with Hawkeye, then the team’s leader. More recently, stories about the Hood have emphasized his mystical powers, tying him to Ghost Rider and Doctor Strange’s arch-enemy Dormammu. And that’s where Parker has real potential to change the MCU. Magic has always been a key part of the MCU, ever since Thor and the first scene of Captain America: The First Avenger. More recently, movies such as Spider-Man: No Way Home and shows such as Agatha All Along have explored the magical side of the universe, indicating how it underpins everything the characters do. As seen briefly in the Ironheart trailer, the MCU version of the Hood has those same mystical powers and, if the brief shot of Parker writhing as runes form on his back is any indication, the powers may overwhelm him. Clearly, the abilities are greater than even he realizes. Furthermore, rumors have once again suggested that Mephisto, the Marvel Universe’s equivalent to Satan and a character tied to the comic book version of the Hood, will finally appear in Ironheart, played by Sacha Baron Cohen. Yes, people have been saying that since WandaVision but, given the recent Mephisto name drop in Agatha All Along, it now seems more likely. All of which raises a question: Why all this magic in Ironheart, a show about a technical genius who uses her science skills? The answer is that this clash between technology and magic has long been a theme in the Marvel Universe, going back to Iron Man‘s battles with the Mandarin, a far more magical (and far more racist) character in the comics. The bigger question involves the show’s depiction of Parker Robbins. A veteran of Hamilton and, more recently, Twisters, Ramos knows how to play a fresh-faced and likable character. Will he be able to keep audiences on his side, even as he goes deeper into the dark arts? Or will he quickly become an unrepentant villain, like his comic book counterpart. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! Ironheart comes to Disney+ on June 24, 2025