Dieter Sturm may not be a household name, but for about 30 years, his work has been all over some of your favorite Hollywood movies. "Fargo." "Plains, Trains and Automobiles." "Contagion." "Transformers: Dark of the Moon" (OK, loose use of the word "favorite" with that one). And when I say all over, I mean all over: on the ground, falling from the sky and blanketing houses and cars.

Yes, fitting for a Wisconsinite, Sturm’s business is snow, and when a Hollywood production needs to call in anything from a flurry to a blizzard, Sturm and his Lake Geneva-based company Sturm Special Effects bring the storm – so impressively that he got a Technical Achievement Academy Award in 1995 for his creation of Bio-Snow 2 Flake, a biodegradable fake snow.

His passion for special effects and synthetic snow, however, started long before he was nabbing Oscars and playing Mother Nature for some of showbiz’s biggest names.

"Well I was of those kid inventors," Sturm laughs. "After some time of picking apart toasters as a kid and building ice boats out of my mom’s ironing board and remote controlling my TV set with wires and pulleys, it was one of those things where I realized I was destined to do something with designing and inventing and creating."

When it came time to go to school, logically the budding young engineer headed off to MSOE. As much as engineering and inventing spoke to Sturm, however, he felt his true calling was in the entertainment industry, so he hunted about the various local radio and TV stations for a job. He eventually found one at WZUU-FM … as the mascot. After working as that for several months, he upgraded to a new position: the station’s full-time janitor.

"I thought, ‘Well, that’s my foot in the door,’" he recalled. "So I quit MSOE, figuring I could always go back to school but I couldn’t always get my foot back in the door like this. So I took a chance at it."

It was a risk that quickly began to pay off for Sturm. While sweeping the station, he learned how to do things in the recording studio and worked his way up to hosting graveyard shifts on air ("as TJ – which was short for The Janitor") and eventually made his way to the station’s promotions director. As all of that was happening, Sturm was also working freelance odd jobs providing special effects for local bands and DJing at The Mad Hatter. Between all of those gigs, he built up enough experience and local cred to nab a job spicing up the groundbreaking ceremony for a Sentry Grocery Store on S. 27th St.

"I said let’s do an exploding groundbreaking ceremony, where we blow up a mound of dirt rather than just sticking a shovel in the ground," Sturm said.

The ceremony was a success, leading to another gig: his first ad, blowing up a TV/VCR for the old long-lived 1940s-style Emergency TV Service commercial.

"That was the one project that actually got me very excited about film and video and my decision to pursue that direction," Sturm said.

He searched out and worked some more jobs, destroying some more stuff and snagging as many credits as he could – all the while also serving as the public relations director for Playboy and Dungeons & Dragons in Lake Geneva – until he finally got his big screen break on the ’80s Corey Haim film "Lucas."

"They fired the effects guy and said they needed somebody to finish up a couple of the special effects gags," Sturm recalled. "There was a sewer cover that had to rotate and lift up, which you couldn’t do on location because, if you ducked down more than two feet, you were hitting water. Then when they were driving down a road and all these bugs started hitting their windshield, we had to come up with all of these bug hits, which were actually capsules filled with grapes and mustard and Edge shaving gel. Thousands of them; I couldn’t even look at mustard for about six months after that one."

Sewer lids and mustard capsules isn’t exactly a prestigious way to mark your first big screen job – a totally cold walk-on job, at that – but for Sturm, the experience and excitement just made him want show business even more. Luckily, Hollywood wanted him too, and he soon bailed from his public relations path to work full-time on the crew of a little holiday film called "Planes, Trains & Automobiles."

He hasn’t looked back since. According to IMDB, Sturm and Sturm Special Effects – founded in 1985 with his wife Yvonne – now have at least 49 film credits to their names (he puts the number closer to around 86 movies at this point).

And not just tiny movies with no-name casts and directors. He’s done the special effects for "Major League" and "Rookie of the Year." He’s worked with directors like Sam Raimi on "A Simple Plan" ("He was the type of director who was very precise, but he’d always give you good encouragement. His last words to you were, "Good luck!" He was very approachable and easy to talk to.") and James Cameron ("He’s a demanding director, but in a good way. He’ll give you anything you need, but he expects it to work."). He remembers wiring up Woody Harrelson on the set of 1998’s "The Hi-Lo Country."

They do some special effects involving pyrotechnics and rigging; he spent three weeks in Illinois, for instance, helping build the explosive charges for a big fight sequence in "Man of Steel." For the most part, however, he and Sturm Special Effects’ true calling card is playing God, delivering snow – as well as other weather effects – to Hollywood’s sunny showbiz sets. Back when he first started, though, the state of faux snow was not up to par.

"When we started doing the snow work back in the 1980s, the only types of materials we could use outdoors was generally plastic flake or Styrofoam flake," Sturm explained. "You’d try to clean it up, and you’d come back to sets years after and find remnants of plastic and Styrofoam things. The only thing that was even vaguely biodegradable was the use of potato flakes."

^{Creating snow for an AT&T commercial.}

Sturm’s inventor days as a child came roaring back as he tried to develop a fake snow that would be good for the environment, good on screen and good for cleaning up. Two years later, after plenty of research, formulations and trial-and-error, Sturm Special Effects developed Bio-Snow, the first biodegradable flake snow material. The only problem: They did their job too well.

"It was biodegrading too fast when it was in wet and damp conditions outdoors," Sturm said. "It would actually start to break down too quick, so we had to go back to the drawing board."

A couple tweaks and a new formulation later, and Sturm Special Effects had its miracle snow: Bio-Snow II. Using that snow – as well as the other types of materials usable for cinematic snow on a case-by-case basis – Sturm’s work only continued to flurry onto the screen. They made the snow for "Fargo," "The Horse Whisperer," "The Lake House," "Public Enemies," "Up In the Air," "The Rite," "The Vow" and more.

Their new snow invention also earned him his Oscar. Their work certainly continues today too, driving to sets in a "Snowmaker Truck" or bringing various foams, flakes and Bio-Snows to adequately winterize a location – although the increased use of CG in movies has certainly changed and altered the business of special effects.

"There was a point in time when our physical effects industry was almost being threatened by the computer age taking over our jobs and not needing live action stuff," Sturm said. "But over time, we found that there’s a lot of things that the computers can’t do or can’t affordably do or they just don’t look right."

"What we found now is a happy medium between the two, where a lot of times we may still do the live action special effects in camera and then they’ll just manipulate or enhance it. Sometimes it’s a matter of even helping us with safety. Years ago, if you had to fly somebody, we’d be using piano wire and hoping that they wouldn’t break. Now, today, you can wire them up with a big, thick cable and then, in post production, do wire removal. Today it’s a good interaction between the two worlds."

And while computers may take over when it comes time for a "Day After Tomorrow"-style world-conquering blizzard for the ages, Sturm and Sturm Special Effects are still around when movies need something a bit more tactile and real. And how does he know how to get it to look so convincing?

"Well, I’m a Wisconsin guy; I see snow 11 months a year!"