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  • Whether you need a snow storm,

  • a huge gust of wind, or a fake rain shower,

  • this man's got you covered.

  • Some TV shows and movies film scenes in extreme weather

  • to make the story feel more realistic.

  • But there's one big problem with that approach.

  • You can never count on the weather to work for you.

  • Jeremy Chernick is a designer

  • at J&M Special Effects in Brooklyn.

  • You can't schedule the entire crew around waiting for snow.

  • So you often have to make it yourself.

  • Jeremy's company creates practical special effects

  • for a variety of live shows, music videos, and other productions.

  • All the Disney Broadway shows, "Aladdin," "Frozen."

  • He made it rain on Shawn Mendes at the 2018 MTV VMA's.

  • J&M also rents out equipment for TV shows

  • like "Gotham," and "Elementary."

  • Basically, any conditions you can imagine,

  • he can whip up.

  • But the trick to creating fake weather

  • is that it just needs to look real in the camera frame.

  • You don't need all the weather in the world

  • to know it's raining in a shot this big.

  • You just need rain in the background or rain on top.

  • So what exactly does it take

  • to create the illusion of weather on camera or on stage?

  • There are a lot of different ways that rain is done.

  • And it depends on whether you're interior or exterior.

  • Outside, you can get a permit to hook

  • up a hose to a fire hydrant or a water truck.

  • You can split that water out to a variety of locations,

  • and usually high big towers go up

  • that can spray water from unbelievably high.

  • Indoors you need a self-contained system attached to water supply.

  • Right above me is a rain bar.

  • So we have rain that is pouring down in sort of a five-inch channel,

  • so if you're looking dead at it,

  • it looks pretty three-dimensional because you have rain here and here,

  • and plus we can add a level of sort of mist into that

  • that will just give it an even larger depth of field.

  • And you can have rows and rows and rows of them.

  • The systems in place to keep that rain from never ever dripping unless you wanted it to rain

  • is actually more complex than the moments when it's actually raining.

  • It's mostly fairly low tech.

  • There are a number of different products

  • that are used to replicate snowflakes.

  • You can get pretty large paper flakes

  • that are squares and they fall in a very beautiful and specific way,

  • you can get shredded paper that falls sort of organically.

  • You can get it shredded plastic, which has a different feel to it,

  • and the way that you deliver that is through blowers that are blowing it far overhead and a long distance.

  • They also have special soap-based products

  • that won't stain clothes or make the ground slippery.

  • Essentially, it's like tiny bits of foam

  • and that is a machine that is pushing that soap

  • through a filter that makes it into snowflakes.

  • Environmentally, there's all sorts of stuff

  • that ends up in the air to fill a picture in terms of haze, fog, smoke.

  • These effects are usually produced with a fog machine.

  • The most commonly used interior fog is glycol based,

  • which is a type of alcohol.

  • Sometimes you want the fog to fill the screen,

  • and other times you want low-lying fog,

  • which requires a few special tricks.

  • That is most often done now using liquid CO2,

  • or liquid nitrogen to chill the glycol fog to a very cold level.

  • And that coldness is what keeps it low to the ground.

  • The thing that's funny about wind,

  • to me, is that you don't see wind unless it's either moving clothing or hair,

  • or if it has some fog or some level of fog in it.

  • J&M has fans of all sizes.

  • We have incredibly quiet fans designed specifically for live television.

  • With any of these weather effects,

  • you want to be extra careful to protect camera equipment and the actors.

  • There's a shield, there's plastic bagging, there's sometimes tents.

  • There's also a risk of flooding indoors.

  • Often scenery is going to be built and designed with water catch underneath,

  • so it will be raining on what looks like the floor,

  • but it's designed to collect water.

  • While these weather systems may not be exactly like the real thing,

  • they get the job done.

  • You don't have to do a huge amount of post work

  • if your special effects are right and they look right.

  • And they're telling your story.

  • And the realistic stuff, is you can tell it's real.

Whether you need a snow storm,

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