First of all, a huge thank you to everyone involved in restoring these classics.
Can anyone explain to me why some scenes in the Grindhouse ESB are so dirty (wide landscapes on Hoth for example) and then the following close up shot is relatively clean. One would think there wouldn’t be much difference in how the film was handled or stored between shots. Just curious.
Well if it’s a composite shot (a sfx shot) it will look dirtier because of all the different pieces of film you’re combining. It’s quite difficult to keep all of them crystal clean.
The landscape shots, for instance might have an animated tauntaun so there’s a composite shot right there. So you got the shot of the landscape, the shot of the hard matte (which are multiple b/w copies of the taun taun shot) and finally the taun taun shot itself. There are plenty of steps for dirt to get introduced since this is all created manually.
Compare that to the close up of Luke, which is straight from the camera.