How hard would it actually be to make 3PO’s arm red in TLJ?
I know we’ve talked about this before but I agree that I kinda wish they would have stuck with the red arm. It helps make the Resistance feel even more scrappy. Leia’s so desperate for funds that she can’t afford to get 3PO’s arm replaced (You also wonder if they even manufacture parts for his model anymore. I guess they could’ve just painted it gold?).
My first thought would be to rotoscope the arm, which would definitely be tedious, like Anakin said. Although it may be the simplest solution, wouldn’t the arm still be shiny? So it still wouldn’t match the dull red arm from TFA.
There might be to other options.
One, you could find/make a CG model of the arm, and then insert it into scenes, and then just rotoscope objects that move in front of it.
The second option would be to actually make a red arm, and have someone wear it in front of a green screen, then try to replicate 3PO’s movements in the film.
At least with these two options, you at least don’t have to rotoscope around 3PO’s arm frame-by-frame, you’d just throw the new asset on top of the existing arm and then just rotoscope around the occasional obstruction.
Even if you were to do all of this work, you’d still have to decide what to do about Episode IX, since he won’t have his red arm there either. I guess you could say he got his arm replaced in the 8-9 interim rather than between two brief scenes in TFA, since there would actually be more time (presumably a year) to have gotten his arm fixed.
Unless someone wanted to put the work in themselves, it just seems like a lot of effort that could be put towards something more significant than that. Maybe at the very least, someone could make 3PO’s arm red in his last shot of TFA and assume it was fixed between 7-8, but again, I don’t know if that makes a significant difference.