I shot every night scene on a different night. Why? Because I wanted to get that dark blue night sky in every shot. And to do that, you have a window of about 15 minutes believe it or not where it is bright enough to show the blue “night” sky, but also not feel like it is still day time.
For the drone shots, we used Aerial Camera Services LLC. Glenn and Tami came out various nights and worked with the unusual framing to create some pretty cool shots. That opening shot of Springfield came out killer!
After we shot an individual scene, I would then send the clips over to Joe Rollins of Rendered Speechless Productions. Joe can take my crazy VFX ideas and bring them to life. If you look at all of these shots closely, you can tell that Joe cares about his work. Little things like reflections and subtle camera shake add to the realism. This all takes a tremendous amount of time and since this was our first time working with this unusual format, there were some initial hurdles we had to get over as well.