Lighting Setup
The lighting for the short is relatively simple. Since I am not a professional lighting artist, I intend to keep it less complicated. For the main lighting source, I plan to use the environment HDR. The lighting would be an afternoon sunset to evening setting. For the first part of the shot, any additional lighting would be signal lights from the jet planes.
For the second part of the short, other light sources are from the missiles, the base spotlights and explosions.
Rendering
I am sticking to the traditional film pipeline for the rendering workflow. Renders are in multi-layer EXR format. The main advantage of rendering in EXR format over PNG format would be the amount of information stored in EXR.
I exported the depth layer for my shorts to add defocus in post-production. Also, I am highly concerned with how the explosion will turn out, as rendering takes a long time for shots with volumes. Hence, I selected the volume passes so that I can have more control when I am colour grading during compositing.
If time permits, I would render out the other more commonly used AOVs, but setting up the nodes would take a long time; hence, I decided to pass on them. In the future, the proper way would be to combine all the main passes to get the final render. But in this case, I skipped this step and went straight to colour-grading the render.
Also, before exporting, I denoised the individual passes to remove fireflies. However, the render sample might be too low for some shorts, and the final output render for some sequences is blurry in the darker regions.