Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1526889
chase vehicles in this team had to be dripping with character and given personalities. They were the "white and blue" to Tyler's "red." OM: They chase a tornado and end up in a town called Crystal Springs, just after the tornado has blown through. Our goal was to achieve that set so the destruction was practical and not VFX. PS: We needed to create an intersection for the scene to play out in. It was important to provide three hundred sixty degrees of dressing, to give the director the freedom of filming and to eliminate the need for VFX extension. Because tornadoes generally create a damage path, we can justify where the tornado damage ended in any given place once we determine where the tornado came from and where it ended up. I found the town of Chickasha and, on the edge of town, saw what appeared to be abandoned buildings on two opposing corners and the other two corners were large grass fields. If we could get permission to "damage" these abandoned buildings and have control over them, we could then create our own destroyed houses in the grass fields. I felt it would be fun and useful to imagine and design them first as intact houses, so we knew what they looked like "yesterday." Then to take it from there and pull them apart in model form. Looking at references of houses in Chickasha, we chose three that felt right and they were cast like characters for the film. One was ripped diagonally showing the guts all the way to the center stairwell. One with a centennial linear style had its face ripped off so it had a "dollhouse" effect. The third one, at the heart of the set, was for a hero scene showing the kitchen completely destroyed, yet the stove still miraculously working with a steaming pot of mac-n-cheese. One of those crazy things that tornadoes do. When the sky clears and the tornado dispels, what remains are twisted trees, snapped power lines and skeletal fragments of these houses, all deliberate and carefully composed. We used prosthetics on the houses further away to define the edges of the tornado path. One cool facade was the Wandora, an existing old western bar on one of the corners. We were able to creatively rip the D. CRYSTAL SPRINGS AFTERMATH LOCATION IN CHICKASHA, OK. GOOGLE MAPS OVERHEAD VIEW. E. CRYSTAL SPRINGS AFTERMATH. GROUND PLAN. VECTORWORKS DRAWING BY KELSEY GARRETT. F. MAC-N-CHEESE HOUSE. MODEL AND DRAWING BY KELSEY GARRETT. D E F