After a while, I managed to tackle the first VFX shot: The Alderaan explosion. Although I did this a year ago, it felt too weird and not dynamic enough, so I completely redid it from the ground up.
I wanted it to not look too modern, but rather make it look similar to what ILM did back in 1997 for the Special Edition which was using digitally composited explosion elements but without the praxis ring that obviously looks dated now. I also somewhat did the shot similarly to how Adywan did it with the moving starfield and slightly offset planet. For now, it is still a WIP since the large green laser beam isnt present in the footage but I will get around to adding it once I figure out how to extract it from the original scene.