Masters of the Air takes place over the skies of Nazi-occupied Europe and at the very least doesn’t flinch from the horrific conditions faced by men in metal tubes flying five miles above ground, writes Adrian Pennington.
The third series about how the US ‘won’ the Second World War from producers Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks (Band of Brothers, The Pacific), Masters of the Air aimed to accurately recreate the Allied bombing missions with authenticity down to the weather conditions and topography the crews would have encountered in 1943.
“We started by studying all the diaries of the pilots flying the B17 Flying Fortress at the time,” explained Phil Arntz the show’s Aerial Director of Photography. “We then went through the script and picked the moments that required identifiable scenery in Europe.”
Arntz was working to a brief from VFX Supervisor Stephen Rosenbaum to capture high-resolution plates that would fit the geographical area of the actual missions and in a way that production could use across the series. Principal photography of the aerial scenes could only begin once...
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