Start your week the right way by immersing yourself in Fujinon’s thrilling 13-minute BTS of how the aerial sequences in Top Gun: Maverick were shot.
This may not be the first Top Gun: Maverick BTS you have seen, it may not be the last either, but all the same it is a belter of a 13 minutes.
“This is not just green screen nonsense, and we're not on some stage,” says Claudio Miranda, ASC, Director of Photography on the movie. “We're out there in the real world capturing all this footage.”
Ain’t they just.
The BTS details the sort of challenges you come across when you try and fly your camera package at 400mph and pull 3Gs with it. And, of course, it majors on the Fujinon lenses that were stuck on the Sony VENICE cameras that shot the majority of the aerial sequences.
“A majority of all the exterior lenses were Fujinon lenses; all the ground to air, the air to air. We needed all those lengths to shoot the F-18s and the versatility they gave us,” comments Miranda. “You know, sometimes the producers ask you why you have all these lenses on here, or you have this package, why you need all these zooms or whatever it is. But they all have kind of a different purpose. And then when they see all the 75 to 400 work, and you're capturing the plane at the end of the runway with a doubler on it and it looks clean and it looks kind of magical, they all kind of appreciate it in the end.”
Have a look below.
Oh and probably our favourite comment on the YouTube video is when someone dismissively just writes “Fujinon commercial.” Well, yeah…