nowadays vfx in movies are so commonly used that it's easy to assume that every film uses them at
some point or another however back in the day for movies like top gun cgi wasn't advanced enough to
create believable cg planes and even 10 years after top gun was released cg planes were still
well yeah
so in order to get shots of real planes in dogfights the filmmakers had to enlist the help of
the us navy and surprisingly the navy did actually agree to help out as soon as possible they allowed
them to put cameras on f-14s and a mig-28 which was actually a north f5 painted black and film
them landing and taking off from the aircraft carrier they allowed them to film scenes actually
on the uss enterprise and they even allowed them to fire a missile a missile just the one
this is why in the movie this missile this missile this missile and this missile are all the same one
that was just flipped and reframed to make it look like different missiles even though they had real
footage of a missile being shot the effects team still had to produce shots of the mig-28
shooting a missile and different planes being shot down and falling through the air in different ways
nowadays you can achieve some of these effects quite easily using action effects by just dragging
and dropping assets into your project timeline like for example gun muzzle flashes smoke and
debris energy bursts and explosions like these aerial explosions and there are many more vfx
assets just waiting there ready for when you need to enhance your project and if you're interested
in getting a discount for action effects then click the link in our video description
now as handy and time-saving as this is way back then they didn't have such a commodity because
things like this didn't exist so in order to create these shots of missiles firing aerial
explosions and planes being shot out of the air they had to be more ingenious using the techniques
that were available at the time and so they did this by building a variety of different size
models of both the f-14 and the mig-28 ranging from 50 centimeters long up to 2.75 meters long
next they had to find an area where they could shoot these models and blow them up and this
brought its own set of problems obviously the most realistic place to shoot model planes is outside
this meant that they needed to find an area with a wide expanse of sky and nothing on the horizon
this area had to be paved or gravel so that there was no risk of causing a wildfire with their
pyrotechnics and they also needed an area where they could be sure to have relatively clear skies
most of the time they eventually found an area of land that was underdeveloped on a hilltop
in oakland california and this became the base where they shot all of the special effects shots
in order to create tension in the dogfights top gun's aerial photography was shot to look
like a documentary this meant that planes were almost entirely in frame and there was also a
lot of camera movement and vibration in order to replicate this the effects team used cameramen who
all had experience in filming documentaries however when filming explosions on miniature
models effects teams normally increase the camera's frame rate up to 120 frames per second or
even 300 frames per second because this gives the explosion more scale and weight but unfortunately
it almost eliminates any camera movement or vibration that the cameraman applies so to remedy
this the effects team attached a drill to their camera rig with an off-centered mass attached
to the driveshaft kind of like this now by increasing the drill speed the team could control
the amount of vibration that appeared on their explosion shots and you can see that actually
happening on this looped explosion notice how the vibration seems to be rotating as the drill would
for the internal cockpit scenes they remove the radar from the f-14s and replace them with cameras
however after various fights they found that the g-forces involved in the dogfight maneuvers
were just too brutal and the actors had trouble just keeping their heads in frame let alone say
their lines convincingly this meant that the internal cockpit scenes had to be shot on a set
contrary to the original film in the 2022 sequel top gun maverick
the filmmakers started the process with the previous knowledge of exactly how brutal it was
inside these aircraft and so they adapted the screenplay around what would be physically
possible for the actors to portray whilst undergoing these extreme g-forces even though
in this day and age they could have reproduced these shots fairly convincingly on a green screen
soundstage and using cgi they didn't this is because in order to capture the way the
actors faces reacted to the g-forces and the facial expressions caused by the adrenaline
and fear they experienced whilst flying they preferred to do them practically
to shoot the cockpit scenes in the first movie the effects team brought an old f-14 fuselage from the
navy and set it up on a gimbal they also had the cameras on its own gimbal and allowed them to
rotate 360 degrees then they built a 25-foot rig up over the cockpit upon which they mounted a 10k
light this was their key light when the plane was supposedly banking or rolling
they could move the light around the rig so it would look like the sun
rolling around the plane behind the cockpit was a rear screen projection showing plates filmed by
the stunt pilot art school for the background of each scene and in front of the cockpit was
a front screen projection that was used to put reflections on the windshields of the cockpit