Principal photography took place in
Oxford and
Montreal on 21 September 1994, the start of a nine-week shoot through to the end of November. This included two weeks of
green screen studio filming. Clarenceville, a 30-minute drive from
Montreal, was the site of the important cornfield scenes (doubling for
Kansas), and the opening and closing of the film features aerial footage in New York City and Hawaii. The remainder was shot in Montreal. Montreal was chosen for the production site due its ideal mix of architecture and weather conditions. "When the script was originally written, the locale was set in Washington D.C." Visual Consultant, 2nd Unit Director and Executive Producer
David L. Snyder stated. "When we arrived in Montreal Bob and I made the decision to change the locale to
New Jersey and not move the production around, as we had found everything we needed in Quebec. A fictional city located in
New Jersey can be fairly nondescript and much less identifiable than
Boston, New York City, or Washington for that matter." Hoskins chose Snyder to establish the appropriate look after their experience working together on
Super Mario Bros. Pre-production commenced at
Ealing Studios, London prior to the move to
Montreal. The Ealing conferences dealt with script readings and visual concepts, including some preliminary filming of various 'practical' man-made rainbows. Once in Canada, Snyder met with Production Designer Claude Pare and asked him to turn his concepts into reality, which included design ideas for the Hudson Harbor settings. A primary task involved taking a French-Canadian city and replacing all the French language signage with English language graphics and signage. For a film that's featured set-piece is a ride through the Rainbow and whose story features the loss of colour to the world, costume designer Janet Campbell's role was especially important. Each character's look was also designed to reflect his or her individuality. "Steve is one good example," says Campbell. "He's older than the other kids and is a rebel, so the colors I've chosen for him are darker. But toward the end, when his true nature begins to shine through, the colors of his clothing become brighter." The best example of Campbell's attempts to showcase colour came in the guise of Jack The Prophet, the character which warns about the impending advent of doomsday. In early October, in the area of
Montreal known as the Plateau Mont Royal, the cast and crew spent several days filming both the inside and outside of an authentic American diner. The Galaxie Diner, transformed for the film into Ynez and Charlie's Galaxie Diner, serving Spanish-Chinese food, plays an important part of the film. About seventy-five extras were needed to portray a mob brandishing baseball bats, overturning cars and generally causing havoc, as the world turns headlong into disaster. Opposing them are 15 members of Montreal's actual
SWAT team (many of whom had prior experience working on films) and several mounted policemen. The eight-strong stunt crew included veteran, five-time world karate champion, Jean Frenette. He performed the motorcycle jump over a car and through the deadly 'Wall of Fire', with a pillion rider seated behind him. To achieve the floating quality for the interior of the Rainbow, originally the traditional special effects concept of harnesses and wire rigs hanging the actors from the rafters was suggested. However, the film's Visual Effects Supervisor,
Steven Robiner, had a different idea. Robiner said "Aesthetics was my main concern; we wanted to show the kids really floating through the rainbow, and none of these actors were gymnasts so I felt strongly that it would be much easier for them to express this feeling of floating and weightlessness being underwater. It was also going to be much easier in the post production process to composite the children within the rainbow, and not have to worry about hand-painted wire-removal." Robiner's plan was to submerge a green screen inside a diving training pool that had an instructors' window, under the water, at the side. Fortunately, a nearby Montreal university, located in Montreal's east end, had exactly the type of pool he was looking for. At first this underwater concept was questioned as being too radically different and untried, however after Robiner pointed out this would also save the production about 3 days of shooting because more than 70% of the rainbow interior scenes could all be shot at this one single pool location with a locked off camera and lights, the producers agreed. To help the children adjust to this potentially hostile environment, the producers engaged the services of aquatic consultant Daniel Berthiaume. Shooting under water lasted for two full days and Berthiaume was in the water for periods of three to five hours at a time. The last portion of the shoot continued on a large sound stage in Montreal, where the Visual Effects segments involving the kids travelling through the rainbow was to be filmed. The stage's 3-story high walls and floor were all painted with the special green coloured paint necessary for the compositing process. Special mechanical seats, platforms and camera rigs concept designs were made by Steven Robiner and John Galt and then engineered and built by Special Effects Supervisor
Antonio Vidosa and his crew. For a shot in which the four kids are to float, spinning in the form a circle with each child holding the hand of the kid on each side of them, with their heads together and feet at the outer edge, then they let go their hands and each spin off and away from the others. Originally it was suggested to do this with the four actors hanging on wires, but Robiner rejected that idea because "hanging four kids on wires just seemed to be a dangerous and time-consuming idea, on top of being difficult for them to perform in..." To produce a shot in which the kids are supposed to be spinning head over heals while floating in the rainbow, another rig was used that let the actor remain motionless while the camera rotated 720 degrees over his head, behind his back, and then under his feet and up again. The old style HD cameras had umbilical cables for power and signal transmission which needed to be carefully wound around a large spool as the camera rotated. ==Royal connection==