James Madison Memorial Wizard of Oz Cyclone Scene 

I'll have to check to make sure I still actually have the original files, but if so I'm sure we could work something out.

@@jjreinem Thank you SO much!

@@jjreinemmiss gulch is calm in the twister

zoyclem oh no 🔋

+Ian Galligan The method is pretty simple actually. The tools I used at the time were all Adobe - Photoshop and Premiere CS3. These days you could accomplish the same with free products such as HitFilm Express. The cornfield was just a static image. I cut out the corn, applied a mild wave effect, and masked off everything that wasn't supposed to be swaying in the breeze. The tornado in the background was just a clip of the tornado scene that followed scaled down, masked off, and made slightly transparent so it would blend. The tornado backdrop was created by creating 3 layers of grayscale clouds in Photoshop that were much wider than they were tall. I loaded those into Premiere, threw a difference mask on them, and then set them scrolling across the screen at different speeds (and a slight downward angle) to set up a parallax effect so that it looked like there was some volume to it. The exact ratio of speeds is something you need to tweak, as the greater the difference between the top layer and the bottom layer the deeper the cloud layer is going to look. In the final version, I also threw in another layer of speckles in the middle to give the impression of small debris being thrown around. Whenever it came time for one of the layers to loop (which happened often) I'd let it run off the screen, leaving a slight gap, and then start running the layer again so that there wasn't a noticeable seam. After that, it was just a question of adding elements filmed in front of a green screen to the video. Some of them were rendered in 3D using TrueSpace, since it allowed me to get really precise keying, but a lot of them were pulled from stock footage. The only really tricky effect work was the difference fade on the transformation into the witch, but most of the work there was done in the initial filming. The fact that most of the video is in black and white and sepia tones helps hide a lot of minor imperfections too. The witch in particular would have been very hard to pull off in full color - because we were using a green screen, we actually had to paint her orange instead of green so she'd show up! Any other questions?

+Joseph Reinemann thanks so much! I was curious as to how you animated/moved the things that fly across the screen in the tornado (The cow, the lady in the rocking chair, etc.). I'm filming green screen footage of my actors to use the tornado, but I'm not sure how to animate them "fly by", spin, rotate, etc, as you've done.

Ian Galligan Premiere and HitFilm both allow you to handle clip motion very easily by setting up keyframes for the positioning and rotation of each clip. It's pretty much the same thing as the scrolling background for the tornado.

@@jjreinemhow did you made this