North American T-6 Harvard with Spitfires
I seem to collect projects involving making things fly; often it is a car or something else equally unlikely. Occasionally I actually get to make an aircraft fly!
The North American T-6 Harvard was an advanced training aircraft used by the RAF, USAAF and Canadian Air Force as well as many others during the Second World War. Many surviving aircraft are now in the hands of collectors around the world and I have used them regularly as camera-planes for air-to-air photography. This particular aircraft was shot in a hangar in New Zealand – how much would it take to get it into the air? Even more importantly, should I put it into the Montage, Photoreal or 3D sections? OK Photoreal it is then!
The first job was to isolate the T-6 from the hangar background, then remove the grumpy looking guy on the wing and retract the undercarriage, rebuild the missing sections of wing (as well as the bit with the legs dangling in front) then add some reflections on the wings and fuselage and replace the reflection of all those orange traffic cones on the spinner, give it a nice sky backdrop and a couple of the most beautiful piston-engined fighters of all time as an escort.
