Apologies in advance for the wall of text/pics
OK, I hate to be a pain with constant posting of more problems but I’ve just been re-watching the Space Battle of Endor a few times and I’ve come up with a wonderfully unrealistic wish list of fixes.
Scale/Perspective:
OK takes up the bulk of the issues with the battle but its also the least likely to be an easy fix. So there are shots with a bunch star destroyers where they are scaled differently yet look like they are the same distance from the camera. This is because they all filmed separately and composited together, but they didn’t add any depth of field to the shots. For instance the size of the SSD next to an ordinary SD:
Speed:
The same type of ship looking like it moves faster/is closer but to small when further way. This affect happens in a few shots in is do to a combination of problems on of which is that they don’t keep in mind that objects that are further away appear to move slower across the screen.
Shadows:
This is really fantasy and would likely take to long/be too hard but the shows are very inconsistent in the battle, with light sources coming from different direction or having different intensities, and in some shots Home-One in particular look like mat painting because the lighting makes them seem flat. Also ships that a close to one another would cast shows on other ships/fighters. I can imagine the seen seeming far more real if you had fighters casting shows on star destroyers as they zoomed past. But again I doubt this could happen.
Explosions:
Now I may be wrong but I think ady said he was doing something about explosions already but either way there are a couple of issues with them. One is that that they are all the same type of explosion regardless of how large or small they are meant to be. So a Star destroyer blows up and look the same as a Tie fighter blowing. The Star destroyer is larger and further away so it should be a slightly different colour and and larger chunks inside. Also the quality difference between ANH/ESB and ROTJ is bigger than ever in the explosion department. They’re all stock explosions here just C/P unlike the others. I mean in EBR you can see a pilot flying of of a cockpit and disintegration when a TIE hits an asteroid. But in ROTJ there is no chucks of anything in any explosion. So I guess if you can put some kind of dark bits in just flying out from the explosion it would look like the ship breaking apart. And while the explosion itself would be played at the same speed the chucks of ships further away would move slower than ones closer to the camera.
Colour:
The colour grading is not consistent between shots, for instant tie fighters often seem way more blue than in other films where as the SSD seems more yellow than in ESB. And then you have the mon-cal ships some of which look the grey/brown like they should, but Home-one looks blue or red tinted depending on the shot. And then we have the MF and rebel fighters that all change hue like its some kind of rave. But for some reason its not a consistent change to all ships in any one shot but each individual ship. Again this would take a long time to fix as I imagine (again little to no knowledge baking this up but) you would have to roto each ship out to recolour it, so it probably wont happen.
DSII: Oh Boy…
It suffers of all of these as well as feeling like a floating sticker (though apparent that’s fixable (understatement) with magic). But here we dive into the whole in the thing (seriously huge) where in sections it feels to light. Now I’m not asking for asteroid cave worm kind of dark here, but it doesn’t feel like they are going deep into the depths of a moon sized space station. So yeah if it were darker the deeper they go, maybe the falcon could put its lights on, then when they get to the core it would have that blue glow illuminating everything which would turn orange/red as the explosions followed them up. I feel like it would give tension and then awe as they navigate this dark tunnel network and reach the cavernous reactor room, which would turn to fear as they are pursued by a fiery wave of death.
Again this is a long shot of a wish list but hopefully some of these are agreeable and more importantly doable. Thanks for reading it it anyway. Unless you skipped to the last line in which case who does that.