The upcoming “Top Gun: Maverick” promises to put viewers in the pilot seat of U.S. navy planes in a way never really done on film before, something glimpsed in the trailers with high quality intense shots of Tom Cruise in an actual jet taking off and performing manuevers.
Now the film’s director, Joseph Kosinski, has explained how he’s pulled it off as a part of Collider’s ‘Directors on Directing’ Comic-Con@Home panel this week. Turns out the big innovation with this film are the 6K cameras, more specifically how the elements that capture and store the images can be separated – thus allowing to film at high quality in incredibly tight quarters:
“It’s a 6K camera, so 6000 pixels wide. It’s a large-format sensor, which is bigger than a 35 millimeter sensor. It’s like cinemascope, I think, is the comparable film size. The real technology breakthrough is that the sensor can be separated from the recorder. So, when you’re looking at a digital camera, the only thing capturing the image is that first inch of the camera.
Everything kind of behind that is power and recording and cooling, so this Sony camera, which is called the Sony Venice, you can buy a version where those two pieces are connected via some fiber opted cable. So this sensor, with a very small lens, can sit in a very tight place or right in front of the actor.
We had four of them pointing at the actor, and the recorders could be hidden in storage spaces on the jet. Normally you’d only be able to fit a GoPro there. Now you’re able to put an IMAX quality camera in that spot. In this case, six of them. So we have multi-camera coverage of these sequences that you can cut a whole scene by just working with those six angles. So that, to me, was kind of our technology breakthrough on this movie. It’s just a really fun way to work when you’re getting it all in-camera.”
Many of the cast members underwent months of pilot training to actually fly the planes instead of relying on stunt doubles and allowing them to shoot aerial sequences in a way never done before (and potentially never again).
As part of the same panel, Kosinski also confirmed he was once attached to a film titled “Go Like Hell” that had Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt at the table read. They couldn’t get the budget they needed, and ultimately filmmaker James Mangold and actors Matt Damon and Christian Bale took it on – turning it into last year’s success story “Ford v Ferrari”.
“Top Gun: Maverick” was pushed back earlier this week and will now arrive in cinemas on July 2nd 2021.
Source: Collider
