adywan said:
Oh, and i really can't see how it even remotely looks like the camera is shooting out of the window when it is in exactly the same position as it was in ANH. Compare these two pics and you can see that there is no difference apart from the scale of the cockpit and the top and bottom frame cropping.
Funny how NO ONE had a problem with the framing of these shots until AFTER George cropped them. I never heard a single comment about how the camera position broke the fourth wall or anything like that. You forget that, in ANH, not much really happened in the cockpit. The original set was fine for the small amount of movement needed for that film. When it came to ESB, more action was happening inside the cockpit so it needed to be a bit more spacious to allow the actors to move around more.
There is a clear difference between those two shots, the shot from Empire Strikes Back is clearly wider than the one from Star Wars due to the larger cockpit, leading to far more lens distortion, especially in the corners of the uncropped ESB frame, more than is acceptable IMHO. The main problem though with the uncropped ESB frame is the curved window frame in the top left corner that is not there in the Star Wars frame, making it look like the camera is shooting through a window into a set from the outside rather than the Star Wars frame where the camera looks like its inside the cockpit with the characters.
No one had a problem with the framing when the film came out theatrically because they were too busy enjoying an amazing film to notice window frames in the corners of wide shots. The uncropped ESB shot clearly looks more like a set than the Star Wars one though, the cropped ESB one does not so it is an improvement in my book.
Okay, so the cockpit has to be wider in ESB to allow for more movement, fair enough, but then adjustments/compromises have to be made with framing to avoid showing the edges of the cockpit window and risking breaking the fourth wall. Either they forgot to do that for the theatrical release or GL changed his mind decades later. In either case it is an improvement in my book, one of numerous improvements GL made with the Special Editions IMHO.