ripping off visual effects from another movie

Niki Mundo · February 20, 2008

I've always like those mig explosions at the end of "top gun", the particles debris-JUST WONDERFUL. I was wondering with all the

thieving going on with the internet is it possible to cut the aircraft explosions out of top gun and put it in my movie, maybe warp it and change the colours a bit..make it my own-do all this with adobe premiere or after effects? Just for my own enjoyment of course. I would never show anyone what I did.

Staying legal because it's the right thing to do,

Niki Mundo

Scott Fritzshall · February 20, 2008

Why don't you try it and find out?

Paul Bruening · February 22, 2008

That's a great idea. Just steal other's FX. In art school they taught us to say "appropriate" not "steal". What if you could buy stock FX footage. 101 explosions against green screen for $29.95.

Phil Rhodes · February 22, 2008

I spent many a happy hour as a callow youth still-advancing through films like "The Long Kiss Goodnight" and "Star Wars" with my Amiga, grabbing the pyrotechnics frame by frame from VHS then billboarding them into scenes in Imagine.

But it's been done, at a professional level, with the very material you're talking about. Go here:

http://www.eurofighter.com/medialibrary/videos.asp

...and watch "Nothing Comes Close" -Top Gun explosions. I saw some stuff from the risible Cage vehicle "Wings of the Apache" used in some el-cheap straight to video action movie. It happens.

But there's really no point in doing this. Go here:

http://www.detfilmshd.com/

...and you can indeed buy, well, not quite 101 but certaily a good few explosions of very varying types for an astonishingly reasonable cost. Needless to say, some of them are cheesy, but there's a lot. They're better because they're not quite as iconic as the Top Gun ones, but more to the point you won't get the wing of someone else's aircraft in your movie as you desperately try to crop out the explosion from its background. During those multi-hour, frame-by-frame capture sessions, I would have given internal organs for this.