Top Gun Swede Part 3 – Special Effects

April 27th, 2008 by Clint Posted in film | 1 Comment »

This is Top Gun Swede Part 3 – Read Part 1 – Read Part 2

Removed this guy from most of the plane shots.

One of my goals for Top Gun was to get familiar with doing basic special effects and compositing in After Effects. I had to remove the sticks from every plane butt, and had to remove myself from wider shots. It was lots of keyframed rotoscoping, and color balancing for the fill – I got to know www.creativecow.net very well. On my borrowed camera, lack of manual controls for aperture and white balance gave me four times the work I would otherwise have had.

Highway through the garage zone.

The green-screen shots use my home-built (PVC + sheets) backdrop. The green for the pilot shots was so blown out (bright) that keying out the background took a luma key first, and then a chroma key for whatever green was left. The “sparkle” from Maverick’s helmet is actually the luma key breaking through, but I didn’t have the time or motivation to tune it up.

I added digital clouds to some shots to try and give a sense of depth and speed. The radar shots are based on an online radar tutorial, and the missile lock overlays were manually animated to follow the planes. What a learning curve! I learned painful lessons that I’ll go out of my way to keep from having to learn again.

Thanks again to everyone involved. You make me happy.