Thunderstruck - an overuse of effects

In my last post I mentioned that too much reverb can spoil a mix, but there are circumstances where overusing effects is exactly what you need. For example last tri, Blake and myself needed to make a thunderstorm noise from the perspective of a fly. We thought for a bit and came up with a plan, to have everything appear 5x the distance away because from his perspective, it was. The process then began with the question "How do we get a good rolling thunder sound" and soon the answer became clear, we need to recreate a rolling sound. The rolling sound in question was a drawer in the C24 room. The drawer wasn't bad by it's self but it lacked bass. By slowing the draw with Protools' time stretch ability, we made the low-mid drawer into a bass-y drawer. But it still didn't quite sound right, it was low enough but it wasn't far enough away. Thunderstorms don't happen in your living room after all. We opened up a reverb plugin and turned it up, it wasn't quite right, it was still too close. What we found by experimenting with the amount of reverb was that the best sound came from having an entirely wet signal. The problem then was that there was still too many mids in the mix, so we added a LP filter so that the bass was the only rumbling you could hear. In the same piece of ambience we created rain sounds. This was a much harder task, because to record water is almost certain death to the mic, therefore we had to recreate it. We started with the slow crackle of old tape, and layered it with the slow crunch of a plastic bottle. It was starting to sound like rain but it was much too close, and didn't sound like something so small would be hearing. In conclusion we drowned the rain with reverb to give the listener the feeling of being small in such an immense environment.