Top Gun Without FX! Hollywood Camera Tricks from the Original Movie

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CGI and digital effects weren’t really an option for the 1986 movie Top Gun because… well, to be honest, digital effects at the time just weren’t advanced enough to create believable CG planes.
And even 10 years after Top Gun was released, CG planes were still… well
Yeah……..

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So in order to get shots of real planes in dogfights, the filmmakers had to enlist (sorry about the pun) the help of the U.S Navy.
And surprisingly the Navy did actually agree to help out!
They allowed them to put cameras on F14s and a “MIG-28” (which was actually a Northrop 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 one.
That is why, in the movie, this missile, this missile. This missile, annnddd This missile…. are all the same one, that was just flopped and reframed to make them 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 of different planes being shot down and falling through the air in different ways.

They started this by building a variety of different size models of both the F-14 and the MIG 28, ranging from 50cm 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 also had to be paved or graveled 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 under development 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 dogfight scenes, Top Gun’s aerial photography was shot to look like a documentary this meant the planes weren’t always entirely in the frame and there was also a lot of camera movement and vibration.

In order to replicate this, the effects team used cameramen whom all had experience in filming documentaries.
However, when filming explosions on miniature models, effects teams normally increase the camera’s frame rate up to 120fps or even 300fps because this gives the explosion more scale and weight but, unfortunately, it also eliminates any camera movement or vibration that the cameraman applies.

To remedy this the effects team attached a drill to their camera rig and in the drill they put a bolt attached off-center to a circle of wood. Now, by increasing the drill’s speed the team could control the amount of vibration that appeared on their explosion shots.
For the internal cockpit scenes, they removed the radar from the F14s and replaced them with cameras, however, after various test flights 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.
so the filmmakers decided to film the internal cockpit scenes on a set in an airplane hanger in Burbank.

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 those extreme g-forces.

Even though in this day and age they could have reproduced these shots fairly convincingly on a green screen set and using CGI.
In order to capture the way the actor’s faces reacted to the g-forces, and the facial micro-expressions caused by the adrenalin and fear they experienced whilst flying, they preferred to do them practically.

For the original Top Gun, the Effects team bought an old F14 fuselage from the Navy and set it up on a gimble, they also had the camera on its own gimbal that allowed them to rotate it 360 degrees.
Then they build a 25ft ring up over the cockpit upon which they mounted a 10k light, this was their key light…

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