I’m currently in the works of starting a short film as a project. I am looking to have a type of drone shot of an almost empty roadway (see example below) with a few black vans travelling down it. This film is being shot in real life, and I don’t have access to a highway nor multiple black vans. I’ve been looking around online but haven’t been able to find any proper tutorial to show me how to make photorealistic roads and surroundings that would look like it was taken in real life. So I was wondering if anyone on here would know of any good tutorials or just some tips and tricks to get me started on it all. Thanks in advance!
Welcome to BA, Jonty!
unfortunately we can’t see your reference picture. Since this is your first post, you can’t attach pictures, yet.
And to guide you in the right direction it would be important to know, what exactly your road…and especially the landscape around it should look like. Also how long the shot is supposed to be - which defines the length of the set you’ll have to build.
It would also be important to know how skilled you already are in Blender and in programs like Photoshop.
The easiest and fastest way of doing this is finding and preparing an existing drone shot as a texture for Blender.
Eg. a shot like this:
If you’re skilled in Photoshop/Gimp you can correct the perspective to make it perfectly straight. Make it tileable by mirror it vertically. It’s possible in this picture, because the light comes from the side. (Retouch some of the details in the road/grass, so the mirror effect is not obvious.) Then remove the streetlights the pole and the car.
In Blender you can simply use this picture as texture for a long, flat plane. Then rebuild the street lights and the pole in Blender. Maybe even add some more poles or some trees to create more depth. And, voila, you have a photorealistic scene. (Creating a bump and roughness map out of the picture, would make it look even better.)
PLEASE BE AWARE: You need to have the copyrights of the Image you use!
If you don’t like the landscape around the road. Then just use the road texture from the image - and create the landscape around it with blender’s built in ANT landscape Addon. Add a ground texture to it and put some lowpoly trees on top of it. How to make them quickly you can see in this tutorial:
…or in lot’s of other tuts.
For the cars you should find many tutorials. But if they’re just seen from the top, driving in a straight line, the animation will be very easy anyway. 
hope this helps…