Texas filmmaker elevates the look of weather footage over three decades

Filmmaker & storm chaser Martin Lisius films a tornado in Oklahoma. Photo: Kim George/Prairie Pictures.

Growing up in America’s Tornado Alley region has its perks for someone fascinated by extreme weather. That’s the case for Texas-based filmmaker and storm chaser Martin Lisius who captured his first storm image when he was just 12 years old.

“I was shooting lighting through the window of my family’s kitchen using a Kodak ranger finder camera given to me by a friend who made TV commercials,” Lisius said. “It was a big, fat cloud-to-ground lightning bolt that made the glass rattle.” Soon after, Lisius was on the roof of his home installing a weather station, with his mother’s permission. “She was a big supporter of anything we were into including science, art, or sports.”

In junior high school, Lisius built a 3D model of a “supercell” thunderstorm which won first place in his local Science Fair competition. A supercell is a thunderstorm with a persistent, rotating updraft that produces the largest hail and most powerful tornadoes on earth. And, it’s the supercell that Lisius targets most often for filming. “It provides a lot of interesting visuals for me. So, between that and hurricanes, I keep pretty busy.” Tornadoes, lightning, massive storm clouds, hurricanes and storm surge are all just a regular work day for Lisius. “My office comes with a view by default,” he said.

All of his content goes directly into his StormStock collection, which he founded in 1993. StormStock has become the gold standard for premium weather and climate footage, and is what other filmmakers access when their production requires the best. To maintain that level of quality, Lisius has become an innovator, always looking for new and creative ways to capture storms on motion picture. In 2005, he anticipated that Hurricane Katrina would become a historically significant event, so he was careful to capture it on an advanced format. The result is the only HD video footage, and 4K (Super 35mm to 4K scan) of Katrina making landfall in the world.

In 2018, Lisius designed and built a 16K video camera system to film storms with. It was groundbreaking and provided a means to capture imagery on an ultra-high-resolution format. “The advantage of shooting 16K is it provides me with a master that I can downscale to 8K or 4K, or send out as 16K for jobs that require that resolution.”

Clients that license his footage include numerous ad agencies, feature film productions, and high-end projects like BBC’s “Planet Earth” and U2’s “U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere” concert series which earned nearly a quarter of a billion dollars during its run in late 2023 and early 2024.

“Having extremely successful and brilliant artists like that come to me to incorporate my work into theirs is an honor, and validates all the effort I have given to my stormy endeavor,” Lisius said.

CONTACT: Kim George, info@stormstock.com, (817) 276-9500, www.stormstock.com