These our actors . . . were all spirits, and are melted into air, into thin air;
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind."
But was there an Oscar for the weather?
Like everything associated with the silver screen, weather on film is seldom the real thing. A director can rarely afford to wait until exactly the right conditions come along, and real weather is often inconvenient and unphotogenic.
As a consequence, spectacular screen weather is nearly always artificially created and unrelated to anything happening in the local atmosphere.
The first award for cinematic weather, in 1938, went to Spawn of the North, when the film was recognised for the excellence of its synthetic snow. In those early films, chicken feathers were often used as a substitute for falling snowflakes; a small feather mimics very well the floating motion of a real snowflake, but used in quantity feathers have the disadvantage of making actors sneeze.
Slivers of painted balsa wood, or even bleached cornflakes, avoided this particular inconvenience. However, they were aerodynamically less convincing and had the added disadvantage compared to the real thing that they did not melt and could be seen adhering to an actor's clothes for the duration of a lengthy indoor scene.
In 1939, a film set in the monsoon season in India, The Rains Came, received an Oscar for the rain.
Rain in any quantity in movies is almost invariably provided by a sprinkler system, with milk, apparently, sometimes added to produce a more "visual" precipitation.
So it was with this film, with some 10,000 gallons of water downloaded on the actors every minute from a huge sprinkler system erected over the set.
Sometimes, however, it was found that water sprayed upwards produced a more realistic image than sprinklers overhead: thus two protagonists seeming to trudge through a heavy downpour might be merely masked by the effluent from an off-camera tanker spraying water skywards.
Nowadays, however, most special meteorological effects are achieved with a computer. The memorable clouds in Close Encounters, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Trek II and Independence Day, for example, were all created artificially, then superimposed upon the celluloid.
And neither was the spectacular tornado in the film Twister a real-time phenomenon; prerecorded footage was employed and combined with computer-generated images, to be merged with the actions of the actors to produce the desired effects.