What looks like a billion-dollar sky battle on screen often begins inside a film studio with green screens, miniatures, and a lot of creativity. We pull back the curtain on the techniques behind our most-watched aerial reel.
The Green Screen Foundation
Every aerial battle sequence starts with a clean plate — a green screen shoot where the performers or miniatures are captured against a neutral background. The sky, the clouds, the other aircraft — all of that comes later. What you're capturing on the day is movement, performance, and lighting.
The key to convincing green screen work isn't the compositing — it's the lighting. If the light on your subject doesn't match the light in your background plate, no amount of post-production will save it. We spend as much time lighting the green screen shoot as we do on the VFX work itself.
Miniatures Still Work
For certain shots — particularly wide establishing shots of aircraft formations — practical miniatures still produce results that CGI struggles to match. The physical interaction of light with a real object has a quality that's immediately recognisable to the eye, even if the viewer can't articulate why.
The Budget Reality
Our most-watched aerial reel was produced for a fraction of what a major studio would spend. The techniques aren't secret — they're the same ones used in productions with a hundred times our budget. The difference is scale, not method. And at reel length, scale rarely matters as much as craft.