As a four-time Academy Award nominated visual effects artist Snow is an integral part of the world that brings you city-destroying tidal waves, flying superheroes and killer machines. His filmography reads like an action film fan's must-see list: he's worked on the Iron Man movies, Star Wars Episode II, Terminator Salvation and Pearl Harbour, to name a few.

While he loves watching these type of films, he's also a fan of old comedies, silent movies and westerns ... Casablanca, Sunset Boulevard and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre are three films he's watched with this children in recent times.

He says the story can get lost amongst the effects but filmmakers are increasingly aware that audiences need something else.

"In certain films, absolutely it can be a problem … you get this onslaught of effects and it's overwhelming and numbing when you have too much going on," he says, from San Francisco where he works for Industrial Light and Magic, the visual effects company founded by George Lucas in 1975.

For a boy who grew up on a diet of the first Star Wars films working with Lucas directly for Star Wars Episode II "was a dream come true" – a long way from a goat farm in Burra Creek, just outside Queanbeyan.

Snow was always a movie buff. At Narrabundah College and later at the University of Canberra, he indulged his passion making films and researching special effects. At UC he managed to convince his course advisor to let him take some media units as part of his computing degree; he was the first student to take courses across the two departments, but everyone was encouraging, he says, "and it led directly to my career".

When he left university he set off on a world adventure, eventually finding a job as a runner for a computer graphics company in London where he would pester programmers to give him hands on experience in his own time. He returned to Sydney to work in computer animation and then in 1994 got his big break, landing a job with ILM to work on Star Trek: Generations.

In 2002 he was nominated for his first Academy Award for Pearl Harbour, going on to receive further nominations for Star Wars Episode II (2003), Iron Man (2008) and Iron Man 2 (2010).

He's had some great fun on the films he's worked on.

"The first Iron Man was fantastic, Galaxy Quest was hilarious, I was very proud of Pearl Harbour, King Kong was fun," he says. He's currently working on the next Avengers movie Age of Ultron, due out in 2015.

Snow is on the trail promoting Noah, the Russell Crowe biblical epic now out on DVD.

"Noah was a great opportunity to work on a film where it was about more than the special effects," he says.

We talk a little about the 1956 epic The Ten Commandments, where Charlton Heston's Moses parts the Red Sea and how interesting it would be to see such a film remade now.

"The Ten Commandments was actually pretty cool, it was pretty innovative for its time," Snow says.

"[Noah director Darren Aronofsky] wanted to expand the whole idea of the biblical epic, make one more relevant for today's audience and I think we did that."

With recent criticisms about film's reliance on computer effects Snow is confident the story will always come first.

"We do have a lot of technology at our disposal but the most impressive strides forward have come from the story," Snow says.

"Anything that's story led is going to be more satisfying in movies … look at Life of Pi, it was terrific, the story was the main thing but it couldn't be told without the special effects."

He said a lot of the big innovations have come from filmmakers with a great story thinking how do I tell it.

"James Cameron was a trail blazer, with The Terminator and The Abyss he had a story and he found the best way to tell it."

He said actors too are adapting to working with computer graphics, saying some of the best ones he's worked with are Hugh Jackman, Christopher Bale and Samuel L. Jackson.

"Films will always be about people. I remember working with Hugh on Van Helsing several years ago and we were shooting this scene where we had his character fighting on the roof of Notre Dame. We had stunt man standing in for him and we're up to about our 16th take and we get this call to ask why we were still shooting.

"So Hugh came over to our set and he nailed it in the first take. He's a very physical actor, and actors of that calibre have this innate ability where they're great at imagining what's around them.

"It was the same with Christian Bale during Terminator Salvation, he was so good physically he could mime, I guess it was, fighting against the space where we'd put the terminator, and it would look spot on every time."

Noah is yours to own now on Blu-Ray and DVD through Paramount.