So I was scrolling through Twitter last weekend and saw everyone posting those Top Gun Maverick memes. Thought hey, that looks fun – let me try making some myself. No clue where to start though.
Finding the Right Tool
Googled around for about twenty minutes testing different meme generators. Most either wanted money or had watermarks. Finally landed on this free website that looked simple enough. Didn’t even need to sign up – perfect.
Getting the Movie Clips
Went on YouTube and searched “Top Gun Maverick scenes”. Found that iconic “Talk to me Goose” moment and used a screen recorder app on my phone. Had to trim it down to 3 seconds because the free version only allows short clips. Took three tries to get the timing right.
What worked best:
- Closeups of Tom Cruise’s face
- Flying scenes with jets
- Any moment with Maverick looking stressed
Adding Text Captions
This part was trickier than expected. Typed in “When Monday meetings could’ve been emails” but the text disappeared behind the clouds in the clip. Had to manually drag the text box lower and make the font bigger. Changed the color to bright yellow so it popped against the blue sky.
Exporting the Final Product
Hit the download button and it gave me four format options. Chose MP4 because Instagram reels take that. The file was way too big at first – like 50MB for 3 seconds! Found the compression setting and brought it down to 8MB. Still not great but good enough.
Posted it to my Instagram stories and got 37 replies in one hour. One guy asked how I made it so I ended up explaining these exact steps to him. Honestly thought meme-making would be complicated but if I can do it while eating cereal, anyone can.