哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎 It's like going from dark mode to light mode on your phone. Yeah, you're like, oh my gosh, I feel optimistic suddenly. So it's no surprise that writers and directors have, for a long time, tried to harness the magic, the power of snow for movies and TV, right? Right. Snow, snow, snow, snow. But of course, you can't get flurries on command, especially in Los Angeles. So in old movies, when they wanted a snow scene, they would sometimes use bleached corn flakes. Oh, that doesn't seem very healthy. The idea was not to eat them. The problem is that they were so loud and crunchy when you walked on them that actors would have to re-dub all the dialogue again afterwards. Oh, yeah. So that was a bad idea. Yeah. And then if you've ever seen The Wizard of Oz, there's this scene in the poppy field. Dorothy, you're waking up. Where a magical snow wakes Dorothy up from this magical sleep. Right. Unusual weather will happen, ain't it? You will notice that the snow does not melt, and that is because it is made from pure asbestos. Oh, that's not good for anybody breathing in that set. And then when the movie It's a Wonderful Life came out, Merry Christmas! They did use some asbestos, yes. But the filmmakers also won a Technical Academy Award for designing these huge fan systems that would blow a much safer mixture of soap, sugar, water, and something called fomite across the sets. Fomite. Interesting. Okay. Well, Merry Christmas! Merry! Merry! So today, a lot of movies, they have thankfully moved on from asbestos, things like that. They use an updated version of that same fomite mixture from It's a Wonderful Life. Like, how does the fake snow work? Fake snow is actually like a, it's kind of like a soap fluid that is essentially push through a kind of foam sock. This is Jeremy Churnick. He's a special effects whiz based in Brooklyn, New York. It sort of makes tiny little balls of foam. But here's the thing, Jeremy's specialty isn't the movies. He's the guy you go to when you want to make special effects on Broadway. And let me tell you, Nate, that requires a very different touch. Often the beauty of snow is sort of the silence that comes with snow. But that machine, when you put it inside, sounds like a vacuum cleaner. So there's just like this like rumbling generator in the background of some beautiful snowy Shakespearean scene. Yeah, really ruins the vibe. This is Outside In, a show where Curiosity and the Natural World collide. I am Nate Hedgie, and today... We are going to a place where real life weather manipulators are finding ways to literally bring the outside in, designing special effects for the biggest Broadway shows and musicals. I see what you did there, Outside In. I'm going to have to refrain myself from breaking into song and making this like a musical episode. I don't think you need to refrain yourself. A great story like Monsters Inc. stays with you forever. And Disney Plus is where you'll find your next great story. From the return of the award-winning hit series, Rivals. Welcome to the naughtiest show on television. To the unmissable crime drama, High Potential. Gotta dead body, gotta go. A lifetime of great stories awaits. This spring on Disney Plus, 18 Plus, subscription required. T's and C's apply. Is your dog scratching, itching or rubbing? When they're suffering from an itchy skin condition, finding an at-home remedy that brings relief can seem impossible. That's where Yvette comes in. They're the only one who can diagnose the cause and offer effective relief to bring your itchy dog a source of comfort. See your vet to find a source of comfort for your itchy dog. Learn more at itchydogcare.co.uk. This is Outside In. I'm Taylor Crimby. Like a lot of podcasters, I'm a former theater kid. So while it's tempting to start this episode with something like December 24th, 9 p.m. or Marley was dead to begin with, I'm going to opt for the more standard route. Cucine! Hello, hi. You're for Jeremy. I am here for Jeremy. Just inside a big boxy warehouse in Brooklyn, New York, is a tall set of orange racks that look like they would belong in Home Depot. Across them are rows and rows of clear plastic jugs. So yeah, we have regular fog. We have little blizzard, extra dry snow fluid. We have fake blood. We have bubble juice of all different kinds. So yeah, this is just nothing but fluid. This is the home of J&M Special Effects. It's part storage facility, part magicians workshop. And the Merlin of this place is designer Jeremy Chernek. I read that you consult with SNL. Is that? This building consults with SNL. Yes, if they need a squirt rig or for blood, vomit, you name it, they might come here depending on whether they need that. They have their own equipment. Jeremy's job is to make the impossible possible. This warehouse, it's jam-packed with all the ingredients necessary to dazzle, delight, and maybe even terrify audiences. But a lot of that is more mundane than you might realize. There's a soldering station in front of us. We have a welding station. We have a bunch of different types of grinders. Nice anvil here. We have a huge anvil. Don't be disappointed. There are areas here where the arcane ingredients are a little more thrilling to behold. Sign on the door that says bomb squad. That's right. For example, in the back of the J&M warehouse are two sections locked and surrounded by metal cages. Imagine this as something like the restricted section of the Hogwarts Library. To my right is flammable storage, so that would be any flammable liquids. This is where J&M keeps the pyrotechnics, the sort of whiz-bang sparkly effects that litter Broadway's adaptation of Aladdin. HELLO! RAPA-PA! OOMAA! RAPA-PA! All that genie magic is really just a colorful form of combustion. The kind you would use on movies and television or in a rock concert. And we got the prerequisite, almost an overabundance of science. Flammable, dangerous, no smoking, no matches, flammable storage, danger, danger, danger. Towards the center of the warehouse is a miniature stage where they test some of the effects in progress. And this is where Jeremy weaves an even more occult form of illusion. I see a dummy over here. Is that like the crash test dummy of the... Yeah, that poor lady has been, has had a lot of blood effects done to her. She gets absolutely... Stage blood, by the way, usually made from corn syrup. Just one more reason this stuff isn't very good for you. Don't ame corn lobby. I mean, it's relatively clean though. I only see a few stains on the back. Yeah, we sometimes wrap her in a poncho. Squirting, dripping, splashing. Jeremy has helped commit on stage murders that range from the campy, think Monty Python of the Holy Grail, to the downright horrifying. This is your right hand. You're going back. On his website you'll find videos of Jeremy teaching how to slit throats while simultaneously squeezing a little blood pouch. Ooh. So maybe just get that blood. This is for the 2023 revival of the Stephen Sondheim classic Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street. Sweet, the days are... The guy in the video taking turns murdering and getting murdered is none other than Grammy award winner Josh Groban. Ooh. The Simpola. Not everything at J&M is quite that sensational. Jeremy estimates a full 20% of the warehouse is dedicated to the white, fluffy stuff of Christmas carols and wintry scenes. So it's floor to ceiling. Our ceilings are, I think, 16 feet tall. And we have stacks and stacks and stacks of different types of snow, the kind of snow you would use in a tiny little tabletop. Each box here is imprinted with a big white snowflake and a description. Course, we're fine. There are big bags of Epsom salt and way over my head, huge rolls of what looks like white insulation. So we set up, we set up a lot of snowy environments in like August and September in order to get it into catalogs and into advertising in, you know, December. So it's a very strange thing to cover a house in snow, uh, in the middle of August. It's kind of like the cottony stuff that you would use for like Halloween spider webbing, but way, way bigger denser. And then you tend to have to fill in all the seams and cracks. Like it won't look good on its own. Then there's other more fine products that you would layer on top of that. You would do a roof. Yeah, it's a big project. It takes usually a day, um, if not more. And, uh, the cleanup is even longer. I love to see the secrets behind a good magic trick, but then afterwards there could be that little bead of disappointment. Once you know, you know, you know, but in a world where CGI has taken over so many of the wonderful illusions of stage and screen, call me old fashioned, but I love to see a special effect that's rooted in the real world. And it's no surprise that Jeremy is still working in this warehouse and not working behind a computer because in theater, you can't just use digital wizardry. His effects use real actors in front of real audiences. And the work he creates here isn't just seen. It is literally felt. If there's rain on stage, there might be people in the audience who, um, actually feel some drops if they're in the close to the rain. There is an environmental and humidity change that happens that may be slightly subliminal, but it's, it's real. But the secret behind that magic is also what makes this kind of wizardry so hard to do. You can't have a rainstorm without having wet water. You can't have wind without blowing stuff around. You can't have snow without understanding where it's going to go and how you might have to get rid of it. So how does one conjure the elements indoors? Let's start with snow. Have you ever used bubbles as snow? I try not to. I bubbles and, uh, on stage are just slippery. This is a wonderful thing to put outside or at a party, but like, no, I've tried to put bubbles in shows a few times. They always get cut because the dancers don't like it. For Broadway's adaptation of the musical Frozen, Jeremy didn't simply let it snow. Instead, he flooded the stage with tiny pieces of paper, not very high tech, but they float down from above the stage, catching the light, twinkling and floating in eddies as they drift. And best of all, they do not melt. Jeremy walks me over to these big, heavy looking tubes dotted with holes that line one rack of the warehouse. They're all painted jet black. We have fans. We have confetti blowers. We have snow tumblers, which are like long tube perforated tubes that will you'd hang overhead and they rotate. And this is what you'd put like little pieces of paper, for example. Exactly. Exactly. And so you can and you can line them up so that you can do 30 or 40 feet of it across the stage. So if you go and see your nutcracker and it's and it's snowing on stage, it might be something like this. I see. And everything's painted black because it's if it's going to be backstage, if it's going to be hiding, you need to be invisible. Black, black means invisible. But even these snowflakes, basically just white confetti can have unintended consequences. That whole not melting bit. It's a two way street. I've done many productions where it snows. And if it snows the very end of the show, big deal. If it snows in the middle of a show, then your choice is, is there snow everywhere for the rest of the show? Where does it go? Is it getting blown around? Frozen is a musical that on stage involves a lot of puppetry. We're talking people on stilts, dancers zipping around the stage, big, sharp icicles that rise up from the ground. When this paper snow piles up, it could get slippery, just like the bubbles. And avoiding injury for your actors is kind of like special effects. One on one. So the production team figured out how to basically sweep the fake snow off the stage at key moments by having dancers in big hoop skirts, brush them off with their clothes. So there's lots of ways in which we can solve all sorts of environmental problems. But the problem solving is a huge part of the job. But if you think snow is hard to manage, try dumping more than 100 gallons of water on stage in just a few minutes. Special effects is a ton of plumbing. That's coming up in just a sec. But first we want to exit stage left for a spell and call back to one of our recent episodes about the role of nature in the movies. After we put it out, we heard from one listener about his favorite outdoor film settings. Here he is. Hi, my name is Aaron and I've always enjoyed movies set in the North, like cold and dark places, like, like Nordic noir, Alaskan wilderness, that sort of thing. Growing up in Missouri, the winters were fairly mild. So seeing that contrast has always picked my interest. And a lot of those are also survival films, which is interesting. But lately I've been really intrigued by the ocean. I recently learned how to swim. So I watch Survivor now and it makes me really wish I could swim in the clear blue waters of Fiji. Thank you so much, Aaron. We love hearing from all of you. And you can always send us a voice memo to outsideinatnhpr.org, or you can give us a call on our hotline 1844 GO AUTER. More outside in after the break. Listen up. That means you. Yes, you. We know you're pointing at yourself. When it comes to party power games, we've got a place made for all sorts. 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From regularly updating our tariffs to get you our best value to smart tech that helps you take control of your energy future. We're here for whatever's next. Just one of the reasons why we're rated excellent on TrustPilot by our customers. Find out more about how we can help at yournext.com. Eligibility and T's and C's apply. TrustPilot February 2026. Wait, wait, wait. Don't skip this. Don't skip this. Don't skip this. This is not an ad. This is me, Nate, and I'm here to tell you that it is yet again time to open up the outside inbox to listen to questions. We have been getting the most random submissions lately. Like can bobcats get hairballs or why does warm dirt smell so good? But we need more questions. So please send us the weirdest, wackiest questions about science and the natural world that you can think of. It is super easy. You can call our hotline at 1-844-GO-AUTER or even better, send us a voice memo to outsideinradio.org. Okay, back to the show. Hey, hey, hey. This is Outside In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I'm Nate Hedgie. And today, producer Taylor Quimby has been taking us on a tour of a Brooklyn warehouse where designers are tasked with bringing the elements inside, on stage, and most importantly, under control. Missed. Oh yeah. So we're going to try and put this into a show. I don't know exactly why, but we are. I'm standing outside of J&M's special effects in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and designer Jeremy Chernick is testing an unusual type of hose. Easy little test there. Yep. That's what the outside is for. It looks like the kind of tube that hangs over the produce section of your grocery store and occasionally sprays a fine mist on the veggies. It's hooked up to a tank of water, air. I'm not sure. And I don't want to interrupt. Loud noise. Thank you for that heads up. Yeah. When I was doing high school theater, the most advanced bit of special effects we ever did was when an actor got brained with a glass bottle made of sugar. I remember gleefully eating the shards backstage just to prove that you could, which by the way, I'm told you shouldn't, but you know, special effects like that. Easy one-offs, they can get added at the very end of a production, but weather effects are so big, they have to be built in from the get-go. And what's more, they're all connected. Take wind, for example. It really puts you in a place. It can imply all sorts of things from like freedom to danger in terms of like, are you on top of a moving vehicle? Are you, you know, racing against time to, I would say, like supernatural? But wind is something you feel. If you're in the audience, you might want a little extra help to make the effect pop, a little bit of atmospheric fog. You can see it when hair blows, but if you add that little layer of atmospheric into it, you can really see it. So, so it's a very useful tool. The reverse is also true. Want to make your fog look extra creepy? Inject a little air movement. Sometimes you just want to roll a whole bunch of that very low-lying fog on stage. It's like the Sherlock Holmes scene. Yes, yeah, like misty morning feel of, you know, is there a show that's taking place in Yale, London? There are all sorts of different fog effects, by the way. Hays, smoke, low fog. Each one different and each one reacts differently to light and movement. But most are still made from the same forms of glycol or glycerin. Basically, fog machines are giant vapes minus the nicotine. So what you're seeing isn't necessarily smoke, but it's actually a vapor. We wouldn't want actual smoke. We don't like actual smoke. We don't like actual smoke at all. Occasionally, Jeremy gets handed a project where he gets to bring all of his toys together, the fans, the fog machines, all the razzle-dazzle. Once he was asked to create an onstage tornado for Hercules the Musical in London's West End. I kind of love the nerdy engineering part. And we kept thinking about different ways in which we could do it. We could do it with like six or eight big fans that pump through the stage and then have to be perfectly tuned with like blades and get the wind to go in exactly the same circular motion. And that didn't really fit. We couldn't find a way to do it. It has to be symmetrical or it doesn't work. Ultimately, they wound up embedding some 40 odd small fans under the floor of the stage for the effect. And we put big pieces of silk into it so they go swirling around so you can see it. We put fog into it so you can physically see the tornado. It's lit beautifully. But as complicated as all that may seem, conjuring a literal tornado on stage. It's nothing compared to harnessing something that in real life seems a lot less dangerous. Set fire aside because I think that's its own beast. And like you said, yes, probably be more complicated than we want to get into. If I think about wind, rain, snow, which is the most challenging? I think the answer is water. Water has a mind of its own based on gravity. So if there is a crack, if there is a hole, if there is anything, the water will find it. Special effects is a ton of plumbing. On a second floor of J&M Special Effects is a wing that screams DIY home improvement, but like bigger. We're in the yellow bin area because everything is in yellow bins. But it is basically a library of parts. Ace Hardware could only dream of this selection. A few feet away. What we're standing in is essentially a wall of wrenches, a work table, a vice, and various ways of sealing pipes. Imagine a workshop designed to accommodate every type of fixing and faucet from every country and every era imaginable. Some of the wrenches here are the size of my arm. And if there's something they don't have, Oh, gotta have a 3D printer these days. 3D printer. We use that to make this to that. Because lots of times something comes out of this shaped hole and we need it to get into a different shaped object. All of this just to get the right amount of water dispersed in just the right way. But water effects also have all the aforementioned problems on stage. There's an English play called Way Upstream featuring a boat that floats on a flooded stage. During a technical rehearsal during the 1980s in one of London's historic royal theaters, a 6000 gallon water tank split and actually flooded the stage, breaking the floors and damaging a bunch of other equipment. When the show finally opened, one critic showed up in Wellington boots as a joke. But even if you don't have a catastrophic failure, you still have to contend with the sound. These are these big boxes are pumping stations for rain. So these have been used on Broadway. Jeremy walks me over to a huge black cabinet on wheels. It's a mobile water pump. Like everything in theater, it needs to be invisible and quiet, which if you've ever used a sump pump on a flooded basement, you know, is not easy. Yeah. So it looks like the inside has like foam, uh, paneling the just same way that like a radio studio would to try and muffle the noise. Open it up. We have three different beefy pumps. Beefy because these pumps need to move a lot of water very fast. We have water tanks. This is a 500 gallon water tank. I think this is like a 400 gallon water tank. We have a couple up here that are a hundred gallons. One of Jeremy's biggest water effects was designed for a show that opened on Broadway in April of 2024. Sometimes you make a choice and you have to live with it for the rest of your life. And whenever you think about it, you can taste it by something you're forced to eat. That taste never leaves a back of your throat. It's a tale in the style of West Side Story, troubled teens, forbidden love, and it culminates at the end in a full on stage rumble. Yeah. And this, so this is Tony Ward winning Broadway show, The Outsiders. And we're talking about a full on big choreographed fight sequence with a massive downpour on stage. It's like, you know, crack of thunder, year soaked in seconds kind of rain. Yeah, it's it's it's it looks like a tremendous amount of water. Arguably, it is a tremendous amount of water. A performance is a week. A system of pipes sends somewhere between 100 and 180 gallons over the stage. Probably a lot less than gets flushed down the toilets during intermission, but still. I think we are currently using not as much water as it looks like because lighting is amazing. And you can if you light the water in the air, it looks like a ton. And it is a lot of water, but it's it's not hundreds and hundreds of gallons. When the scene starts, the water starts to pour through rows of invisible nozzles, first in a thin drizzle, then growing into a downpour. As the actors throw and take punches, the water whips off their hair like a music video. It bounces off the hood of an old car perched on the side of the set. They are soaked. But the things that you don't see are that the water is around 98 degrees when it hits the actors, because, A, we have to protect them from illness. And, you know, if it's freezing, then and they're in the middle of doing a thing, it's really jarring. You also can't see that the stage has literally been built to capture all that falling water so that it doesn't turn the theater into a moldy mess. And you can't see that this fake rainwater is filtered. I wouldn't use it to make ice tea or anything. But actors don't have to worry if they take an inadvertent gulp. It is sanitized through a filtration system and through a UV system to really make sure that the health and safety is maximized. There isn't a Tony for best special effects. The Tonys are Broadway's version of the Academy Awards, by the way. But the outsiders won best lighting, best sound design and best musical last year. And Jeremy sees how all of it came together in the best way possible in the onstage storm he helped design. The emotional poignancy of the story, the choreography, the way the costumes react to the rain, the way the set reacts. Like literally the way the rain is lit, the way that sound amplifies the sound of rain. Every department within the universe of creating that show is collaborating in a way that just like really works. Towards the end of my tour, Jeremy walked me through one rack at J&M Special Effects that looks a little bit like the sort of storage you'd see at a fire station. Piles and piles of huge hoses, snaked in coils, big enough to screw into a city fire hydrant. It reminded me that as exciting as it is to see these magic tricks performed on stage, invisible and seamlessly tied into the narrative. The work that goes into them is shockingly real, tangible, and maybe if I'm being honest, even a little humdrum. I have one of these jobs that everybody's like, oh, your job is so cool. Because I walk around and interview people and I'm like, you know, a lot of it is just a job too. I have those things and I was thinking the same thing about yours. I was like, man, designing Special Effects so cool. And then you get to the hose portion of the tour and I imagine that like there's parts of this that are just like, yeah, it was just got to get the hose to the place. And imagine that you also, when you're done, you have to actually like dry the hose out and make sure it's clean because water can turn into yuck quickly. So there is a lot of work in the setup and in the sort of maintenance of all of this equipment. Yeah, the JNM hose cleaning department, not the most thrilling part of the job. But they work hard and I appreciate it very much. In a sold out theater, under the lights and the spell of a good story, the hope is that nobody in the audience is thinking about hoses or pumps or how all that water got there. That comes after. In the moment, Jeremy hopes all they see is the rain. That is it for today. And from all of us at Outside In, we hope you have a happy 2026 with just the right amount of magic and mystery. This episode was reported, produced and mixed by Taylor Quimby. Our staff includes Felix Poon, Marina Hanky, Justine Paradis and Jessica Hunt. Our executive producer is Taylor Quimby. Rebecca LaVoy is NHPR's director of On Demand Audio Music by Blue Dot Sessions. And don't forget, we are a podcast. Subscribe wherever you get yours. Can you do the wicked? Can you do the wicked? No, I can't. I just did it. Did you? Yeah, I nailed it. No notes. No notes. All right. We all need advice, but it's not always clear who to ask even in 2026. Enter how to. The long standing advice show and ambi award nominated best personal growth podcast that's back with new episodes and a new host who me, Mike Peska, each week I tackle a listener question ranging from travel to finance to relationships and beyond with help from a world class expert, you know, someone who actually very much knows what they're talking about. Think of it as eavesdropping on someone else's therapy session without the co-pay or awkward silences. You've got questions. We'll find the experts and the answers. So follow how to with Mike Peska wherever you get podcasts. Have you ever asked yourself, can the president really do that or wondered if there was too much money in political campaigns? 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