Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1539634
through massive freight elevators, and how the dome's fifty thousand LED panels would be assembled piece by piece. My research led me to discover that Steven Spielberg built a massive set in a blimp hangar for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. This seemed like the right scale for the show. When I mentioned this to location manager Duffy Taylor, he showed me a giant hangar built for WWII blimp construction—the Tustin Blimp Hangar, one of the few wooden structures of its kind remaining. This astonishing space became the entrance to the cave site for Paradise. The location also doubled as an airplane graveyard, where discarded transportation—including Air Force One—was dumped after the evacuation. The VFX team then placed the hangar into a Colorado mountainside with 100-foot nuclear blast doors that could withstand the apocalypse above. Early in prep, directors John Requa and Glenn Ficarra, cinematographer Yasu Tanida, and I took a private tour of the Las Vegas Sphere, arranged on the fly by Duffy Taylor. Standing in the space above the world's largest LED screen, we knew we'd found our model for Paradise's enormous sky dome. Scalable, real-world technology became our cornerstone. C D F E