STACK #123 Jan 2015

You shot the movie using a variety of cameras, from SteadiCams to security cameras and iPhones. What did you want to achieve using this shooting technique? Interestingly enough, my take on this was that we have cameras and point- of-view shots that would traditionally be considered

part of a ‘found footage’ movie. But I didn’t want that to be distracting for the audience; I didn’t want it to get in the way of the storytelling. So we used lots of different cameras, and we had an amazing camera operator in Peter Rosenfeld. The irony of this film is that the entire movie was shot handheld. We didn’t have camera dollies or cranes or any of those techniques that you’d normally use in a movie. But the audience doesn’t notice. About halfway into it, you forget about the cameras and the ‘found footage’ aspect; it just becomes a movie. And we did that intentionally. The biggest nightmare was trying to keep the cameras dry with all the rain pouring in, but the camera department did a wonderful job. Can you talk about theTitus, the ultimate storm-chasing vehicle seen in the film? The Titus was a vehicle designed by David Sandefur, our production designer, which drew inspiration from an M1 Abrams tank. He’s really into cars and worked with a group of artists and designers and came up with this concept of the hydraulic outriggers with grappling claws that deploy anchors to secure the vehicle to the ground and so forth.

Richard Armitage and SarahWayne Callies on set with director Steven Quale

Richard Armitage with SarahWayne Callies

most spectacular things in the film. As I was researching this, I found that it’s an absolutely true phenomenon, and it looks almost exactly like we depict it with our digital simulation. So now we have four different, unique tornadoes throughout the film, and as each tornado comes, it gives the audience something new and unexpected to deal with. Then, the difficult part was how do you create all that and do it in a photorealistic manner? We wanted it to be absolutely real. So we took all our reference footage and showed it to the visual effects companies. These are probably some of the most difficult visual effects to accomplish because everybody knows what clouds look like, and everybody knows what trees look like blowing in the wind. This is not a science fiction movie where you can create your own universe to have a unique particle effect and special rays

that cause destruction. We had to create these tornadoes and these digital cloud formations that looked exactly like the real tornadoes. The big challenge was trying to use the artistic and the scientific methods, and having those two meld together so that the effects companies could deliver digitally what I wanted. All of the effects companies did a fantastic job getting there. We did a hybrid approach, a combination of the practical special effects and digital effects integrated throughout the film, and it worked flawlessly. The actors did an amazing job, having to always be running around with rain and debris hitting them. It also added so much realism to the film because all that stuff flying around was real and we augmented it with digital rain and debris.

Fortunately, since we were filming in Michigan, we found a specialised auto company, Kustom Creations, that does prototypes and concept cars for Detroit, and they were able to

• Into the Storm is out Dec 31

build the Titus for us. It was based off a Dodge pickup truck, and then heavily modified. All we had was the chassis of a pickup truck, and they built the entire vehicle on top of that and did a wonderful job. It is almost a little mini-character in and of itself when you’re trying to deal with all the storms in this movie.

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