Why Top Gun: Maverick Action Scenes Feel Unbelievably Real

INTRODUCTION

The runaway financial success of Top Gun: Maverick that makes it, at the time of this video, the sixth highest grossing movie in US box office history - coming out ahead of even an Avengers movie - can be boiled down to numerous factors. 

It was built on existing copyright and boosted by the success of the original Top Gun. It starred Tom Cruise. It pulled at the sentimental strings of a huge audience that missed the big, Hollywood blockbusters of old while still revitalising it with something fresh. It was directed with a deft handling of emotion. And - what we’ll talk about in this video - it was executed with amazingly filmed aerial action sequences that kept audiences right on the edge of their seats.

IN-CAMERA VS VFX

But, what is it that differentiates these moments of action from many of the other blockbuster set pieces that we’ve become used to? I’d pin point it to an effective use of ‘in-camera’ photography. In other words using real effects more than visual effects.

“I think when you see the film you really feel what it’s like to be a Top Gun pilot. You can’t fake that.” - Joseph Kosinski

Much of the appeal of what makes up a blockbuster comes from the sequences which feel ‘larger than life’ and offer a spectacle. Whether that means large choreographed dance routines, car chases, bank heists or displays of superpowers.

Every scene like this requires a filmmaking solution beyond the realms of just shooting two actors talking. 

On the one end we have practical or in-camera effects. This is where real world filmmaking, engineering solutions and optical trickery are mixed - such as shooting miniatures or using forced perspective.

At the other end we have CGI, where computer software is used to manipulate and create those images.

Almost every big budget movie nowadays, including Top Gun: Maverick, uses a combination of both practical photography and computer-generated imagery. However some films, like Maverick, prioritise in-camera effects in order to achieve shots with a greater tie to reality.

“You can’t fake the G-forces, you can’t fake the vibrations, you can’t fake what it looks like to be in one of these fighter jets. We wanted to capture every bit of that and shooting it for real allowed us to do that.” - Joseph Kosinski

Once director Joseph Kosinski and cinematographer Claudio Miranda had the shooting script in their hands they had to start making decisions about how they would translate the words on the page into awe inspiring aerial action set pieces.

Shooting aerial sequences is a large practical challenge. 

First, they broke the aerial shots that they needed into three types of shots: one, on the ground shots, two, air to air shots, and three, on board shots. 

1 - ON THE GROUND

To execute the many aerial sequences in the movie they turned to David Nowell, a camera operator and specialist aerial director of photography who had worked on the original Top Gun film. 

“If you analyse the first Top Gun about 75% of all the aerials we actually did from the mountain top because you can get stuff on a 1,000mm lens that you just can’t quite get when you’re filming air to air. And I brought that forward to Joe Kasinski, saying, ‘You have to do this on this movie. This is the difference it makes.’ And so, we did. We spent almost a week on the new Top Gun just on the mountain top getting all the different shots that they needed.” - David Nowell

Cinematographer Claudio Miranda selected the Sony Venice as the best camera for this shoot - for reasons we’ll get to later. This digital footage was warmed up a lot, given deep shadows and had artificial 35mm film grain added to it in the grade to give the footage a similar feeling to the original - with its warm, bronzed skin tones.

To further enhance the original Top Gun look, Miranda consulted with Jeffery Kimball, the cinematographer on the 1986 film, who passed on information about the graduated filters that he shot with.

Grads or graduated ND filters have a gradient level of ND that is strong at the top and decreases at the bottom, either softly or with a hard definition. Usually grads are used to shoot landscapes or skies. When the darker ND part of the filter is placed over the sky it produces a more dramatic, tinted look.   

To capture all the angles that they needed for these scenes meant that a massive camera package was used. Six cameras could be used for the on-board action, four cameras could be mounted to the plane's exterior at a time, the air-to-air shooting was another camera and a few cameras were needed for the ground to air unit.

Like the original they decided to shoot on spherical lenses and crop to a 2.39:1 aspect ratio. This was due to spherical lenses having better close focus abilities and being smaller in size than anamorphic lenses, which allowed them to be placed in tight plane interiors. 

To get shots of the planes from the ground, a camera unit was equipped with a Fujinon Premier 24-180mm and a 75-400mm zoom. They also carried two long Canon still lenses that were rehoused for cinema use: a 150-600mm zoom and a 1,000mm lens.

When this wasn’t long enough they used a doubler from IBE Optics. This 2x extender attaches to the back of the lens via a PL mount and doubles the focal length range. So a 75-400mm zoom effectively becomes a 150-800mm lens.

Tracking fast moving objects so far away is very difficult, so the operators ended up using modified rifle scopes mounted on top of the camera to help them sight the planes. 

The on the ground scenes captured an F-14 Tomcat, which was re-skinned or made to look like an F18, with digital effects. This is a great example of the kind of intersection between practical photography and digital effects which I talked about earlier.    

2 - AIR TO AIR

Although very useful, on the ground cameras are unable to physically move the camera to track with the aircrafts beyond using pans and tilts. For dynamic, in the air motion and a raised point of view the camera team shot air to air footage.

This required shooting with a CineJet - an agile Aero L-39 Albatros jet that has a Shotover F1 stablised head custom built onto the front of the nose which houses the camera. 

The camera can be operated while the position of the plane is also adjusted relative to the other planes they were shooting by an experienced pilot. 

Since the Shotover is primarily designed to be used from a slower moving helicopter, and on Maverick they were shooting a fast moving Boeing F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter jet, they needed to come up with a technical solution.

“The one big change for Top Gun is that the Shotover systems that we’ve used for years…was never fast enough to go any faster than what a helicopter would do. But then Shotover…they updated the motors that would take the high torque needed to pan and tilt while flying 350 knots, that’s close to 400 miles per hour.”  - David Nowell   

For certain sequences that required a shot looking back on aircrafts, they used an Embraer Phenom 300 camera jet that had both front and back mounted Shotovers.

The Venice that was mounted on the Shotover was paired with a Fujinon zoom, either a 20-120mm or a 85-300mm zoom. Some helicopter work was also done with the larger Shotover K1 that had an extended case that could house Fujinon’s larger 25-300mm zoom.

3 - ON BOARD

Arguably the most engaging and jaw dropping footage in the film comes from the cameras that are hard mounted onto the plane itself.

There are two ways that this kind of footage can be shot. The most common technique involves placing actors in a stationary car, spaceship, plane or whatever kind of moving vehicle it is, on a studio soundstage. 

Outside the windows of said vehicle the technical crew will place a large bluescreen, greenscreen or nowadays, a section of LED wall. The actors then pretend the vehicle is moving, do their scene and the crew may give the vehicle a shake to simulate movement. 

In post production this bluescreen outside the windows is replaced with either footage of the background space they want to put the vehicle in, such as highway footage, or with an artificial, computer generated background.

The two main reasons for shooting this way is that, one, it is usually a cheaper way of shooting and two, it offers a far greater degree of control. For example, it allows the actors to easily repeat the scene, the director can monitor their live performances and talk to them between takes, the sound person can get clean dialogue and the DP can carefully light so that the scene is exposed to their liking. 

Instead of taking this more conventional approach, Top Gun’s creative team made the radical decision to shoot this footage practically - in real life. 

To prepare, the actors underwent three months of training, designed by Tom Cruise, so that they could withstand the extreme forces that would play out on them during filming.

Along with the difficulties involved in the actors giving complex emotional performances while flying at extremely high speeds, rigging the on board cameras to capture these performances was no easy feat.

The main reason that Miranda went with the Sony Venice was due to its Rialto system. This effectively allows the camera to be broken in two: with one small sliver that has the sensor and the lens and the other which has the rest of the camera body and the required battery power. These units are tethered by a cable.

1st AC Dan Ming, along with a team of engineers, came up with a plan to mount six cameras inside the F18.

They custom machined plates that could be screwed into the plane that the cameras were mounted to. Three Venice bodies and a fourth Venice sensor block were mounted in front of the actors in the back seat of the jet. These were tethered to a body block and battery rack that they placed near the front seat where the real pilot was. 

Two additional sensor blocks were also rigged on either side of the actor to get over the shoulder shots. Again, they were tethered to body blocks at the front of the plane.

As I mentioned, fitting that many cameras into such a tight space meant that the lenses need to be spherical, have good close focus and be as low profile as possible. Miranda went with a combination of 10-15mm compact Voigtländer Heliar wide-angle prime lenses and Zeiss Loxia primes. 

Earlier I mentioned that this method of hard mounting the cameras came with a lack of control. This is perhaps best seen by the fact that once the plane took off, not only were the actors responsible for their own performances but they even had to trigger the camera to roll and stop when they were up in the air.  

“Ultimately when they’re up there it’s up to them to turn the camera on and play the scene. I mean, the biggest challenge is not being there to give feedback. So you’re putting a lot of responsibility and trust in our cast. So, that was a unique way of directing the film for those particular scenes but it’s the only way to capture what we were able to get.” - Joseph Kosinski

Filming in this way meant that they’d do a run, come back and sometimes find out that parts of the footage wasn’t useful because of the lighting, or the actor’s eyeline being in the wrong place, or even because an actor didn’t properly trigger the camera to record.

However the footage that did work looked incredible and gave a feeling of being in a real cockpit - complete with all the vibrations, natural variations in light, and realistic adrenaline filled performances from the actors. These images wouldn’t have been the same had they shot these scenes in a studio. 

Four cameras were also hard mounted directly onto the exterior of the jet. Again they used the Rialto system with wide angle Voigtländer primes. Another advantage of using the Venice is that it has a wide selection of internal ND filters. 

This meant that they didn’t need to attach a mattebox with external NDs to decrease the exposure which would have made the camera’s profile too big for the interior shots, and would have probably been impossible to do safely on the exterior cameras due to the extreme high speeds of the jet. 

CONCLUSION

Top Gun: Maverick brings us back to an era of filmmaking where real effects are used to tell stories and the CGI that is used is done subtly and largely goes unnoticed by the audience. 

For years now, by and large, I’ve been nonplussed watching most action in films. The overabundance of CGI effects triggers something in my brain that tells me that what I’m watching isn’t real, which makes the action feel less exciting. 

By putting us in an environment where each and every manoeuvre is physical, real and visceral it makes the stakes real. This leads to a real emotional connection and immersion in the story.

There’s a reason why you often hear some auteurs sing the praises of in-camera effects and disparage the overuse of CGI. Maverick uses the best of both worlds. The crew executed most of the action with bold, practical photography, which was safe and innovative. 

Subtle digital effects were then brought in later when necessary to make up for those shots which were practically impossible. 

I can only hope that Hollywood executives take this away as one of the reasons for the film’s financial success and encourage these kinds of filmmaking decisions going forward. There’s always a time and a place for great VFX in cinema, but sometimes shooting things practically is the best way to go.