The Effects in this film have been far more extensive than I would have cared, but once all the elements are in place it seems strange to envision the movie without them.

The main area that we employed the largest amount of computer time, was in the area of wire removal. There are a few programs that semi automate the process, unfortunately I don’t own them, so most was handled by importing the selected footage into After Effects, and converting the quick time files into a Targa File series. These in turn were opened up in Photoshop where the good old cloning tool did the business. This sounds relatively easy, but in some cases you really have to know your stuff, if you’re dealing with lens flares and other artefacts, that aren’t following a linear path. Once the wires are removed, some of the footage can then be laid up into new backgrounds.

This was also done in After Effects using the strong chroma key tools available. The Jets can then have a third or “forth axis” of motion added to it. So if the shot looks like it may be a good one to use to follow a path - such as in a fly by - then we would add a little depth to the shot. We controlled it through the z-axis sometimes adding a little buffeting in the Y. So as the aircraft gets closer to the viewer, it will be actually be travelling relatively faster as you would expect. It didn’t take too long to work out that it wouldn’t work trying do it in a standard 2D editing program; by just scaling the plane it actually goes slower as it comes towards you and looks kind of strange.

Another issue in dealing with moving object in 2D or simulated 3D, is to work out the amount of motion blur to add. Too much and it looks like a slow moving object that's out of focus, and too little and it kind of has a strobing effect. The frames aren’t being blended as they would if you were really filming a true aircraft. It takes a bit of guessing to get the right amount. The best way I found of doing it was to analyse a lot of real aircraft footage, which had to be done for other reasons. We were after a real look not your typical Thunderbirds model feel or an over the top Gamer come CGI look.

In the opening scenes the planes were used to set the mode of the movie and the initial intention was: “Yeah let's make it look really Top Gun”. But the story has an under written romantic tragedy to it, and that wouldn’t set the tone we were aiming for. Once the U.S. Aircraft encounters the enemy aircraft all that changes and it’s a little more full on.

The other area where we improved the shot footage was to include vapour trails behind the jets. We didn’t use it on many shots but if it was deemed necessary we dropped them in. It wasn’t as hard as I had initially thought just a case of making a stream of particles in 3-D Max, or similar package and adding some motion blur to them. These particle streams can in turn be stretched a little or a lot, which gives the effect of controlling their velocity. You can do it in the program I just preferred to try it that way -‘I don’t know don’t ask’. Once you have the vapour trail it was a case of motion tracking it to the Jet nozzles. Sometimes a frame at a time if the aircraft were jumping about a little.

Basically we used the same technique on the missiles. With the missiles we were able to use just a 2D representation, no model and no 3D. They pass by the camera so fast your eye never has a chance to register any perspective anomalies.