VFX Breakdown - The Day After Tomorrow

I watched lots of breakdowns for The day after tomorrow, simply because I love the movie.
I liked the tsunami one because I like the way they made it... I think they made a little model and just let lots of water through it, it's something I'd like to try myself one day that's why it caught my eye. It's similar to what they did to create lava in the star wars movies, so I suppose it's a well known and often used technique.
This is probably something I'd do if I ended up doing a tsunami myself, just because it'd be a good excuse to get my hands dirty :') I like to get away from the computer every now and then.
But because my mind is a little more set on the tornado I did watch this one with a lot of attention, I like how dark the scene is, there is just slight highlights, it has an amazing effect. Also it lets everything blend in together, since nothing is especially standing out.
For example I think if the scene was brighter I think it'd be too obvious that the buildings weren't originally there... And to be honest I'm not gonna lie, I just like dark mysterious things, so I'm in love with this dark scenery.
And again it all comes down to layers layers and more layers. Particles dust, shadows, highlights, and more particles, cause it's what brings it together, it'd look weird if it wasn't a layered mess.

The day after tomorrow - Tornadoes Scene

Since I am doing natural disasters, it was a good excuse to watch The day after tomorrow again. Purely for research purposes, cause I couldn't remember exactly why I love the film :') 

Well anyways, the reason why I decided it's relevant is because I really love how they've presented the power of mother nature, and tornado's is one of those things I've considered for my video. 

I planned on either showing the mother nature in action, or the aftermaths, and they did both equally amazingly. 

For example the 3 tornadoes bit, in LA... I love how they've showed that, it wasn't going on really fast, it was moving fairly slowly, casually ripping things to pieces, throwing things about, and because of it's speed you can actually make out what these things are and it looks so much better than flashing images. You could see the detail of it and take it in and understand it a little better. Appreciate the beauty of it all. 

I also loved the ending of the scene, everything is really loud, but all of a sudden it cuts to the cleaner inside, everything goes so quiet, so you can hear the sparks and the radio coming through his headphones as walks towards the door slowly, the door is back lit so you've got a really bright light coming through the bottom gap. It creates an awesome silhouette of the actor opening the door. From there it cuts to the wide shot of half of the building not being there and in the background you see the huge tornado moving away into the distance. It's the little things that create this awesome!

I couldn't find an actual scene from the movie, but here you can see pretty much what I'm on about. 

 I loved the buildings ripped in half etc. things hanging off the edge, like cables and bits of furniture, lights still flashing inside, things still slowly loosing balance and falling off, things still flying around in the air... it was good calm aftermath to let you think about what just happened, let it sink in. And also it gives you an idea of how strong this thing was! 

I watched a making of, of this movie and I found out a few interesting things and ways, for example in this tornado scene, they actually had a helicopter flying really low to get objects and plants on the streets etc. to act the way they did, just to make it a little more convincing.

But overall I really love tornadoes so it's got a big chance to be in my end product.
Before I'd want to move anywhere close to making it I'd want to do some research into how and why they're actually formed and maybe fit something like this into the video. But that's something to think about later.