With the bacta tank scene, without having to recolorize the scene, I wonder if you could make the shot blue or red, whichever color you make the bacta, to make it seem like the bacta tank is just bathing the room in whatever color it is. You could then just rotoscope and recolor a few different color lights in the shot, like R2’s lights, 3PO’s eyes, some of the lights on the back wall. Might not look right but just an idea.
This idea had reminded me of TMBTM’s War of the Stars II: The Future in Motion, which he had taken a similar approach to the scene.
And it turns out, he had also edited a version of the Wampa attack, quite brilliantly I might say, incorperating a few of the Special Edition shots and some great new VFX and innovative editing.
I would love to edit together something similar to this, but obviously slightly differently. This is a great use of existing footage to reshape it into something new. I highly reccomnend both War of the Stars I and II for this.
Yeah, I feel like you could reconstruct Veer’s death scene with a lot of material that’s already in the movie. You could reuse a Snowspeeder model crashing/burning shot (or pull one from BTS material, key out the blue screen and find a new background), and the AT-AT animatics are almost exactly like the shots of the AT-AT Luke destroys, so you could reuse those shots (and flip/crop them maybe). Then the only shots you would need to recolor would be the shot of Veers/walker pilots raising their hands up, and maybe that quick shot of Hobbie. Both shots are pretty short. But I could understand not wanting to put that back in.
I managed to find this on my HDD, with a version of Veers dying being remade with footage only from the final film. Could prove to be something similar to your ideas.
The AT-AT falling over in the final film, was originally shot for the Veers death, but then used for Luke’s bombing when Hobbie’s suicide was later cut.
Luke’s saber training is a pretty cool little scene, so I think it would be worth messing around with!
Since lightsaber VFX is the most common thing that is done in After Effects, it shouldn’t be too hard to do, just might be a little finicky to get it to perfectly line up with the sabers from the rest of the film.