Nimoy approached ILM early in development and helped create storyboards for the optical effects sequences. Many shots used matte paintings to extend backgrounds and create establishing shots without the cost of building a set. Matte supervisor Chris Evans attempted to create paintings that felt less contrived and more real—while the natural instinct of filmmaking is to place important elements in an orderly fashion, Evans said that photographers would "shoot things that [...] are odd in some way" and end up with results that look natural instead. The task of establishing the location and atmosphere at Starfleet Headquarters fell to the matte department, who had to make it feel like a bustling futuristic version of San Francisco. The matte personnel and Ralph McQuarrie provided design input. The designers decided to make actors in the foreground more prominent, and filmed them on a large area of smooth concrete runway at the Oakland Airport. Elements like a shuttlecraft that thirty extras appeared to interact with were also mattes blended to appear as if they were sitting by the actors. Ultimately the artists were not satisfied with how the shot turned out; matte photography supervisor Craig Barron believed that there were too many elements in the scene. The scenes of the Bird-of-Prey on Vulcan were combinations of live-action footage—actors on a set in the Paramount parking lot that was covered with clay and used backdrops—and matte paintings for the ship itself and harsh background terrain. The scene of the ship's departure from Vulcan for Earth was more difficult to accomplish; the camera pans behind live-action characters to follow the ship as it leaves the atmosphere, and other items like flaming pillars and a flaring sun had to be integrated into the shot. Rather than try to match and combine camera pans of each element, each component was shot with a static camera and the pan was added to the resulting composite by a motion control camera. The sun (a light bulb focused by a convex lens) was shot in different passes to create realistic light effects on the Bird-of-Prey without having the light bleed around other elements in the shot. The script called for the probe to vaporize the Earth's oceans, generating heavy cloud cover. While effects cinematographer Don Dow wanted to go to sea and record plumes of water created by exploding detonating cords in the water, the team decided to create the probe's climatic effect in another way after a government fishing agency voiced concerns for the welfare of marine life in the area. The team used a combination of baking soda and cloud tank effects; the swirling mist created by the water-filled tank was shot on black velvet, and color and dynamic swirls were added by injecting paint into the tank.