1996 - Shadowood Theater Twister
It's 1996 and it was decided that we employees would 'decorate' the Shadowood Theater for the movie Twister. While my coworker Randal and I were the driving force behind this work, we had help from a number of other people, whose names escape me at the moment. This is the result.
The video is from an old VHS tape that I finally got transferred to digital. There is no monologue as I hadn't prepared anything ahead of time and was very tired during filming and wasn't up to improv.
I have attempted to add Closed Captions to the video that covers the basics of what is below.
If you want to read the details of what I remember about the build please read on.
First the theater itself. The lobby had a 35' ceiling which we took advantage of. I don't think we would have attempted this if it were not for the high ceiling. The theater was under construction at that time to expand it from its original 12-plex and two of the screens were shut down on one end. You can't see the work in this video since it didn't affect the lobby.
When a customer first walked in they were directed to walk into the damaged 'barn' and under the twister; then the ticket taker would rip their ticket once they passed through.
The soundtrack for this prop was a loop that I created from a snippet of "The Wizard of Oz" and then tweaked. We used two of the theater speakers covered in black cloth in the corners of the barn for the sound. At the end of the 19 minute loop you hear Toto yelp just before it starts over.
The barn was built using some 4" soundproof insulation foam board that was 'left over' from the theater expansion. When you walked in, there was a simple rotating fan that blew down on you which is visible later in the video. The inside just had a few odds and ends that you may see in a garage/barn. The roof had a few tar paper shingles from Home Depot. The weather vane on top had a small motor making it spin and on the opposite side was a running spigot and in the bucket we had a small pump recirculating the water. There was soap in the water to hide the pump in the bucket. You can see the hose on the inside of the barn if you look for it.
The flashing lights on the barn were low voltage and rigged up by Randal and I remember that there were exposed wires on one of the lights (on purpose). When the District Manager came in to check out the display he expressed concerns about the safety of this and we asked Randal to come address his concerns. When the technical explanation for why it was safe were too much for the DM, Randal got frustrated with trying to use logic and science and just licked his palm and grabbed hold of the wires and stood there and said "Its safe for anyone." The expression on the DMs face was priceless.
The tornado was the easiest item to design.
In the ceiling we removed one of the tiles and replaced it with a 3/4" piece of plywood to which we attached one of the spare motors from the movie projectors. Not knowing the load bearing capacity of the drop ceiling framework we added secondary support wires from the plywood to the ceiling's support beams just in case.
We then attached one of the special aluminum film makeup reels to the motor shaft. These reels are about 4' across and are used when splicing together the smaller reels that get shipped to the theater. We then hung twine down and the bottom of the twister is a 12" ring normally used to spool the film onto when showing the picture. If you look at the middle platter of this picture you'll see how the film is spooled from the top platter to the 12" ring. We then collected old trailers and wrapped the film around the string framework using glue and tape to hold it the strings. This was done while the twister was in place while standing on a 30' A-Frame ladder (I hate heights). Some cotton was attached to the outside using spray glue and then it was lightly spray painted. When you looked up the shaft of the tornado you could see the makeup reel at the top and the flood lights shining down through the holes in the reel. The glove was added at the last moment mostly due to a lack of sleep on my part (I thought it was funny) and that it would give you a sense of the rotation of the twister if you were not paying attention (yes it was actually necessary... this was Boca Raton after all).
The clouds were created by laying out large pieces of plastic sheeting, spraying a crap load of 3M adhesive and then sticking cotton batting to it. It was then spray painted and hung up on the ceiling with double sided tape. I believe that the lightning was just your basic strobe light.
As the project progressed we decided to add the people being 'sucked' into the twister. The seats were taken from one of the theaters that was not being used due to the construction. They were hung by stringing up nylon rope up through the drop ceiling to the support beams. We attached a sheet of the same 4" foamboard as the 'floor' with zip ties and roughed it up a bit. The people were built out of pantyhose and newspaper and were added after the chair was hung due to the difficulty of trying to hang it all at once. We had thought of using popcorn but I think that we decided against it due to the spoiling factor.
If I remember correctly the man in the chair is supposed to be Randal.
Many people worked on this project and spent their free time to make this happen and my thanks go out to them all.
