Monroville said:
adywan said:

Funnily enough that's exactly what i've been working on. Here they are, although not yet quite finished:

You may want to play with/consider blurring the buildings more and more as they recede into the background due to atmospheric effects (like when you look at a city from far away and it has an almost transparent bluish look). Maybe that was one of the problems with the city effects of the prequels was that everything in foreground to background looked sharp, when you would have focal issues and atmospheric effects that could have made the scenes more realistic.

Things like the monorails and air traffic could be nice visually, but at the same time the focus should be on the main action, not the stuff moving in the background.

I would nix the trains, but maybe put those slow pulsing red lights that buildings here have on the top (for airplanes at night) and have one or two cloud cars VERY far in the distance... maybe just reduced to a black dot with running lights. Maybe something enough to bring the city to life (like maybe the addition of audio effects to indicate a busy city behind and underneath them) but not enough to pull away from what we are supposed to be paying attention to.

Some of those ideas I'm very keen on but one of the things I remember from seeing the film all those years ago was the feeling of dread that such a huge city being so quiet instilled in me at the time (I'm not sure if that was a deliberate directing decision or just down to not having enough money to bring the place to life back in 1980).

It foreshadowed that something wasn't right about the place (with the Imperials kicking around it would make sense for Lando to try and keep as many people away from danger as possible without looking like he was...you know, administrate casual).

The daytime scenes kind of blew that out of the water but the quiet did set a tone which was backed up by Leia's apprehensions.