Somewhere in central Kansas, Jesse Gillett looks to the sky and watches as the dark clouds assemble. A storm is on its way.

He’s not afraid when the dark sky turns green and, like in a movie, the heavens above him start to rotate. His first thought is to move toward the storm, camera in hand for documentation, when the funnel cloud drops. Unlike many, he doesn’t think of running, hiding, or shielding.

Gillett ’26 (SFA) is a member of Storm of Passion, a volunteer group that has restored and keeps in operation the longest-running tornado intercept vehicle in the world, and he’s desperate for the money shot – a recording of a tornado going over the vehicle in which he sits.

“I hate lightning, that’s the one thing I cannot stand,” he says. “It just happens so suddenly, and the thunderclap is so loud. At least I can see the tornado coming at me, and I can prepare for it.”

The last two years, after the spring semester has wrapped in May, the digital media and design major has left Storrs, destined for Tornado Alley.

Gillett has been fascinated by tornadic activity for years now, earning himself a nice living by playing storm chasing video games like Twisted for viewers of his popular YouTube channel that currently stands at about 139,000 followers.

He remembers the date – June 1, 2011 – when it all started for him, looking out the window of his childhood home, an elementary school kid watching, off in the distance, the sky turn dark, then green.

Fourteen years ago on that date, no tornado dropped on Stafford, Connecticut. Monson, Massachusetts, just across the border, wasn’t so lucky, hosting an EF3 tornado that stopped by for dinner.

“I had seen the movie ‘Twister’ before, but June 1, 2011, was a defining moment for me. You see these things out in Oklahoma and Kansas, but not in your backyard,” Gillett says. “I remember looking out the window that day and seeing the updraft of the supercell going up, and you could see the anvil cloud coming off it and spilling out over the sky. Then two days later I went into Monson and saw just complete annihilation, homes completely obliterated. I remember it all very vividly.”

That core memory sticks with the now 23-year-old as he studies documentary-making at UConn and plans his next move after graduation, likely freelance video editing and animation for other storm chasers chronicling their adventures.

Developing a Brand

Gillett says his parents allowed him on the internet as a youngster, keeping him away from inappropriate content but letting him explore the possibilities online. He found YouTube fascinating.

Among the first videos he uploaded were stop-animation shorts with his Legos in the starring role. Then came clips taken with an old camera. In high school, he started a channel bearing his name, added content to it regularly, and, by 15 years old, had branded himself as “that kid interested in weather.”

Before coming to UConn in fall 2022, Gillett sidestepped to CT State Community College Manchester, where he earned an associate’s degree in communication and media production. Later, he took a leap when he cold contacted Ryan Shepard, head of Storm of Passion.

Shepard purchased the tornado intercept vehicle, known as a TIV, in 2019 from fellow storm chaser Sean Casey, who built it in 2008. Gillett, by now plugged into the storm chasing community through social media, had an idea for his own passion project.

He told Shepard he’d like to meet up with him in Kansas during storm season, that he wanted to shoot some video to promote the vehicle’s restoration for both Shepard’s use and Gillett’s professional pursuits.

Their meeting led to an invitation to the National Storm Chaser Summit, an annual gathering of storm chasers to talk shop, meet fans, and gear up for the coming attraction. Gillett successfully pitched the idea of him joining the team as media communications director, brand builder extraordinaire.

He also sold the idea of an eponymous documentary, “Storm of Passion,” about the Breitenbach family: father James and sons Evan and Angelo, the team’s president, crew chief, and support vehicle navigator, respectively.

The result is an hour-long film that earned Gillett the 2025 Audience Choice Award from the Bare Bones Film Festival and the Storm of Passion team national exposure beyond their niche community of family and friends.

At an event for the movie “Twister” in Wakita, Oklahoma, this year, Gillett says, fans, bona fide followers and admirers, asked to have their pictures taken with team members – by name.

“They brought me on to do this brand remediation, to rebuild this from the ground up and to see the success of that is one of the most rewarding things,” Gillett says. “There was a line of people who wanted to get signatures from the crew, when only three years prior there was nobody.”

Drawn to the Midwest

Beyond the adrenaline rush, beyond the desire to face one of the most spectacular weather events there can be, Gillett says there’s something special that draws him like a magnet to the Midwest.

First, there’s Shepard: a quarter of a million dollars in debt from aeronautical school student loans and the cost of building a business with expensive equipment, yet still excited in the face of danger and eager to carry on a legacy, Gillett says, noting his BFA senior project is a 20-minute film about Shepard.

Then, there’s the vehicle, all 14,000 pounds of it.

The Storm of Passion TIV has had multiple lives, from 2008 to 2019 when Casey was at the helm and from 2019 until now under Shepard’s care, and multiple iterations as the main character on shows like National Geographic’s “Tornado Intercept” and the Discovery Channel’s “Storm Chasers.”

Gillett says it’s faced a tornado producing winds of at least 175 mph – “at least” that high because the anemometer was destroyed after logging that wind speed. It’s the highest wind speed a vehicle of its type has ever survived, making the three occupants inside by default the only ones who’ve ever seen such a sight firsthand.

At 7 tons, the TIV is made of several layers of steel, aluminum, and Kevlar, Gillett says. Steel crossbeams prevent objects from breaking into the cabin, and the windshield is bullet-resistant polycarbonate. Its engine is a stock 2007 Dodge Ram 3500, modified to 625 horsepower, and its fuel tank holds 92 gallons.

A 2×4 can slam into it at 120 mph and barely make a dent, he says.

“Remember the show ‘Mythbusters?’ They pit the TIV against a car behind a Boeing 747 and tested them at wind speeds up to 250 mph over the front of the vehicles. Let’s just say the car was airborne. The TIV, it just didn’t move,” Gillett says. “Having seen that, I feel a little more confident when I get inside.”

Seeing the Tornado, Then the Devastation

In 2024, Gillett rode inside the support vehicle Doghouse, which trails behind the TIV until the latter veers off to intercept a tornado. Doghouse stays nearby, just out of harm’s way but not so far from danger. From it, Gillett watched as one of the strongest tornadoes ever recorded tore through community after community around Greenfield, Iowa.

“You see the tornado touch down and these tentacles of subvortices, which are these little tornadoes inside the main tornado,” he describes. “Then, going up to this town that was just obliterated, it reminded me of June 1, 2011. We see the tornado, but we also see the devastation left behind. That’s sort of changing my perspective slightly.”

This year, Gillett sat in the back seat, passenger side of the TIV, eager to mount his camera inside its turret. He estimates he’s chased as many as 40 storms and 20 tornadoes over two years, including the May 18 wedge tornado that devastated a portion of Plevna, Kansas, in the middle of the night.

“I was looking out the turret,” he says, “and I could only see the left edge, which is this sharp divide that comes down and meets the ground. I couldn’t see the right edge. Later when I went through the video, I figured out that the right edge was just off the screen. Since it was about a mile and a half away from us, if it’s that big, it means the tornado was over a mile wide.”

Yes, Gillett is in pursuit of the money shot, but he also recognizes the importance of his work as a filmmaker, a documentarian of history, someone who at any moment could have camera rolling on something science has never seen before, something nature has never produced.

Immortalizing that is important, he says.

But he has no plans of being an outlier on his own. He knows the TIV could save his life, and chasing as a single-person team carries too much risk, simultaneously navigating the terrain, studying the clouds, watching doppler, driving at highway speeds, filming.

Gillett says over Memorial Day weekend this year, Storm of Passion was just one group in what seemed like a conga line of chasers, a potentially dangerous situation if only because too many vehicles on a single road inevitably produces a traffic jam.

“We’re sitting on the side of the road, and I’m watching this wall cloud start to wrap up and rotate, and I’m thinking, ‘If this tornado drops and surges south, it’s going to cross this road and hit all these people,’” he says. “There was a van in front of us with a bunch of students standing around outside, and if the tornado dropped, they would have had 30 seconds to get in the van and leave.”

His experiences have taught him about tornado dynamics – if the tornado’s left-to-right motion is pushing it to the right, it’s not likely to deviate course to the left, he says, doing so requires too much energy, although it has happened.

His YouTube channel has taught him about branding, self-promotion, and analytics – he earns a percentage of the ad revenue based on how many people watch and how many stay to a video’s end. Some months are better than others, he concedes.

His time at UConn has given him a foundation.

“I went into this embarrassingly not knowing a lot about shooting cinematography. I had done everything on the computer or sort of away from the camera,” he says. “Learning how to make a proper documentary, learning what observational filmmaking is and how you do it effectively has changed the way that I produce films or videos.”

He continues, “UConn is giving me some practical experience. There have been a lot of classes here that have been really helpful, and if I hadn’t taken some of them, I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing.”