Monroville said:adywan said:Now onto the Carbon chamber issue. I was looking over your plans to have the chamber at the top of the shaft but this creates more problems than it solves. That is a hell of a long way for Luke to travel to find Vader and really doesn't make sense. Why would Vader run all that way away from Luke just to lure him to the vane? All that needs doing is redesigning the actual vane so it can contain the carbon chamber at the top and explain where the corridors that led them to the chamber disappeared to. Its quite plain to see now i have gone through the Luke jumping down from the chamber to the pipe that you can clearly see that behind him is the base of the carbon chamber as the architecture and piping is very similar. It is meant to be one complete sequence as you see Luke drop from the chamber (even though you can clearly see that he jumps from hanging onto a pole in the first few frames of the pipe sequence, but this was just to simulate his drop during filming). So this means that the carbon chamber is indeed meant to be built into the vane. Now it looks like i'll have to build some sort of model for the vane shot and do a lot of redesigning, but at the same time keeping the look of the original.
Fair enough, but will you make the connecting arm to the Vane thicker to account for having to hold up the weight of the Vane itself? I guess that's one reason I never thought the carbon chamber was in the vane itself but either above it or within the shaft wall, and that the tunnel Luke went through was the connecting rod TO the vane - the connecting post to the vane/pod (whatever you call it) just didn't look strong enough to support a structure other than something that was mostly empty or a bunch of corridors.
To further address your points Ady:
(1) as far as Vader leading Luke a few hundred meters or more from the carbonite chamber to the Pods below them, it is not hard to take into consideration that if that was Vader's only choice as far as a secondary trap to set for Luke, then Vader would have no choice but to lead Luke to the pod. Cloud City is a pretty big place, and some things may not be conveniently close by just for Luke to go from one dead end to another. This is Cloud City, not The Cube.
Regardless,
(2) when you say that after watching it, it is apparent that the tunnel he goes into is directly below the carbonite chamber, that's what I thought as well for a while (which is why in an earlier post I suggested adding the bluish lighting and maybe some smoke effects to that area Luke is coming from, being that the carbonite chamber was surrounded in a bluish haze). 
The problem is just matching the carbonite chamber directly to the pod makes no geographical sense. Regardless, it doesn't necessarily mean the carbonite chamber is IN the pod. Here are some images to further illustrate what I am referring to:
The carbonite chamber can only be in one of three places:
(A) the area I illustrated earlier, being above the pods (though I still see your point, as the back of the tunnel DOES match the set design of the carbonite chamber. Even so, we don't need to see Luke go through every stairway or tunnel to realize he is moving through a city to get from one important room to another - we only need to see the important stuff)
(B) the carbonite chamber is within the wall of the main shaft, and the connecting rod to the pod is the tunnel Luke enters. If this is the case, the connecting rod will have to be moved up to match the angle of the tunnel as well as connect to the pod where the window he comes out of is located.
(C) the carbonite chamber is indeed located within the pod up above the window. The problem here is that even without any gantryways (as shown in the Ralph McQuarrie painting, as well as the fairly poor "forced perspective" props used on the set) the carbonite chamber set is pretty big. Using Vader (who is roughly 7 feet tall) as a standard of measurement, you would have to add a large cap onto the pod to account for not only the size of the set, but that the set was surrounded by at least a 15 to 25 foot open air area to allow for the blue haze and the fact we could not see the background walls. Even with a fog, the back walls would have to be far enough away for the fog to eliminate any details, especially any back wall lighting.
- to further add to this, even with Vaderios' modification of the thickness of the Pod, it is still way too thin to account for the carbonite chamber if it is within the Pod, not to mention that if the carbonite chamber is directly above the window Luke is thrown out of (as we can see here), there should be a large bubble or disc visible directly above said window to again account for the proximity and large size of the carbonite chamber.
You may want to also consider (1) making the connecting boom thicker to account for the weight of the pod it has to hold up. Yes, STAR WARS has artificial gravity generators and all that stuff (and maybe that is what the fins on the bottom of the pod are for), but it still looks flimsy if it is holding up an actual "steel mill" of sorts.
Also i won't be extending the actual carbon chamber in any way. Although it does look pretty cool in the McQuarrie paintings i feel that the limitations reached during filming actually helped the scene and gave that claustrophobic feel that this scene needs. Make the chamber look to big with all these extending platforms and your treading too close into PT territory for my liking. if you look at the PT everything is just so expansive and flashy which just became a show piece and did nothing to help create any sort of mood for the scene. Less can be more.
In regards to this, while again I understand that this is your edit, and if I or others want to do something different it is up to us to learn Vegas and After Effects and do our own thing, I am still perplexed by this.
What was the planet below the Death Star in ANH:R? Or even the Lucas added X-wing fly-by, or your added TIE fly-by, or the Mos Eisley CG overhead view? None of that was really necessary to the story telling, but that is almost beside the point. Lucas did what he did to test ILM's new CGI rendering to see what he could do for a possible set of Prequels. I am sure you did what you did just to add some of your own creativity and imagination..jpg)
I do not see how including something like Vaderios' rendering (of course, a more thorough one) could HURT the story telling process if we are going to have a pretty but unnecessary Cloud City CGI fly-by of Leia's Cloud City apartment, among other SE added elements. It's as if you bounce back-and-forth between the SE and the purist editions at will sometimes, making arguments that counter previous arguments (you made an argument earlier I believe that you wanted to make these closer to what was envisioned, thus no EU stuff. Well, if McQ and Kirshner envisioned the carbonite chamber as having gantryways going off into the distance, wouldn't you be going against their intentions now?) Not to mention: how can something be claustrophobic if there is an obvious "open-air' environment surrounding the carbonite chamber?
This is not to get pissy (okay, maybe a little), it is just a little confusing as to what the real objective of this is all about.... other than the obvious (that you're doing it for yourself)