Masters of the Air
James Clarke speaks to DNEG visual effects supervisor Xavier Bernasconi about working on high-flying WWII series Masters of the Air
ver five decades as a director and producer, the legendary Steven Spielberg has brought O landmark World War II stories to movies and TV. In doing so, millions have encountered an important era of our human history. Spielberg’s TV series Band of Brothers and The Pacific have been landmark events, and in early 2024 on Apple TV+, the latest Spielberg-produced World War II drama, Masters of the Air, launched.
Amid the series’ battles for freedom in the skies, DNEG was in the midst of the creativity as the main VFX partner. In total, the studio delivered over 1,600 shots and more than 200 assets across 32 sequences that featured in eight of the nine episodes of the series.
DNEG’s work on Masters of the Air spanned a period of two years and nine months, and saw a global crew of 1,800 come together. The range of work that
DNEG produced for the series included accurate 1940s 3D landscapes and cloudscapes – from the deserts of North Africa, to the Fjords of Greenland and cities of Europe – all populated with hundreds of plane models, liveries and damaged variations shown performing in extremely complex choreography.
DNEG was tasked with building the majority of the plane models featured in the series and visualising epic dogfights, which saw hundreds of planes in battle, each crewed with digi-doubles. Of this expansive workload, DNEG visual effects supervisor Xavier Bernasconi notes: “We had five units and each unit had a DFX supervisor that would look after an episode or particularly large sequence. They each ran their own unit with artists from across our global studios.
“I headed up all the work coming from those five units, and [production visual effects supervisor] Stephen Rosenbaum oversaw the entire visual effects delivery for the series, working with all the various VFX partners for the show.”
