Sean Casey's Tornado Alley IMAX

At the Museum of Natural History tonight, I got to see a press preview of Sean Casey's excellent new film Tornado Alley, which opens on IMAX screens around the country this month.

[video link lost]

The storm pieces together footage from Casey's eight years of chasing into a single, simplified 40 minute storyline, which covers both the science of Vortex2 and Casey's own quest.  Those who watched Discovery's Storm Chasers will know more of the story, and will recognize some of the cuts across the various storms, but for this format I thought the story worked well.  And, it was really cool to see the TIV2 on the streets of Manhattan:

As a severe weather geek (my weather postings here), I really loved the movie--it was great to see all those storms in that massive format. Often on TV, the focus gets drawn just to parts of the storm, but here you could see details of the storm that you can never see on TV.  Casey answered questions afterward, and I asked him how he kept his lens clear (air jet system), and if he had more Wadena, MN storm footage. Casey said he did have a bit more footage, but made an interesting comment that it's really hard to select footage for this giant format when working on smaller monitors; he said that he would have used more of his Wadena footage if he had known what it really looked like on the big screen.  Other interesting tidbits from the Q&A: the IMAX camera is actually owned by Sean Casey's father; the internal shots in the trucks were shot in Vistavsion (I used to work with Visatvision cameras for special FX work back in the 1980's), and even though the film's done, Casey will be out again this season with a 3D HD camera.

Check out the Tornado Alley link above to see where this is playing near you, it's definitely worth seeing!