I've been looking at the movie cockpit instruments lately because it seems they filmed the insert shots of things like stick handling at least twice. They did an initial shoot on set, then filmed a bunch of Rapier stuff in August 1998 and then more pickups as late as October which is getting awfully close to their delivery date. Things like the Broadsword instrument panels were reshot at that late date. I was wondering how much you could tell in the final movie if you knew what you were looking for.
Even in the final version, maybe to differentiate Knight's Broadsword from Paladin's, you can see they have different control yokes, but the earlier versions of the Broadsword just looks like maybe original Canberra instruments.
So those might have been intended to be replaced anyway. There's Knight's:
...and Paladin's:
This got me thinking about the Rapier a bit more. The fighter dashboard got a complete redesign between these early insert shots and the later release version.
A big noticable change is the red digital display next to the main screen, but it also seems to lack the light-up button names from the final version. It's just text above the switches and toggles instead. They also shot a bunch of green screen forward cockpit views in the Rapiers. And I figured that since they had to have a lot of the effects shots in the pipeline early, they likely would look different, and I think I'm right - the top of the dash in that shot is almost certainly the early version.
So how do we tell? They almost never show above the display in the finished movie when the inserts are used so it's not easy to see if they match. But we do have some full frame non-matted versions of these renders:
So if we compare this we can see more of the upper part of the dash and the top end of the the screen. If we compare it to the top of the screen in the pic from when Blair is playing in the Rapier when he arrives at the Claw, we see the top of the screens aren't that dissimilar,but they're not quite a match. But we can check something else to see! The airline version of the movie (and maybe most VHS copies? not sure) was open matte for most of the film other than the full CG sequences:
Any composited shot was rendered out full frame it seems, so we can see way more of the area above the screen. The round display in the upper right looks like it could be the same, but the rest don't quite match because they changed them in post production. I don't know why they totally rearranged the buttons, though I do think the new one looks a bit better. I know that they probably replaced the insert shots because they wanted to make the screen animations a lot more readable on screen. The original ones they used on set were interesting but kinda cramped and a lot more basic. Function over form, I guess.
This one shows a lot more of the part above the screen in the original version (and the screen is just blue for replacement later I suppose).
But when I look back at this one, the answer is that maybe it's neither?
When looking at where the screen is there it looks like it's set back, and they obviously rigged it to put a screen in there. So it looks like either way the instruments were put in front and maybe neither version was in place when they shot the green screen cockpit first person view. But with the magic of editing and matting it doesn't really matter since you can't really tell. It would have been nice to have a shot that went from looking at the instruments to then pan up to looking out the window though!
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