Pit Droid Ponderings

[savagecreature]

In my continued search for high quality pit droid reference I ran across this image on the interweb:



Note how two of the droids have the underside of their domes exposed.  I didn't recall this image from the film, so I went back and carefully re-watched the pod race sequence.

I did find this image (shown here with levels adjusted to improve visibility):



but I was unable to locate that first image that prompted my renewed search.  My next thought was  that it might have been in the special features or deleted scenes, so I carefully re-watched those as well. In particular the Complete Podrace Grid Sequence.


This yielded some interesting images. The first one I ran across was this:





That one is actually one of the best I've ever gotten. You can definitely see that there's a lot going on there where the head attaches to the top of the neck.  So much so that it's difficult to discern. You can, however, plainly see a recessed disk that the neck attaches to which would allow the droid to rotate it's head relative to the position of it's body. That is to say; look to the left or right without moving it's feet.

and lastly I found this one in the extended 2nd lap, showing the underside of the pit droid dome in the lower center-right:



I did not, however, find that first image and I still have no idea where it came from, which confuses me a little as every or nearly every element in the shot is CG, so you wouldn't think there would be a lot of off camera angle shots popping up.

All of these definitely provide more information than I had before, which is always a good thing. I just wish I had them at higher resolution. 

Does anyone here have this film on Blu-ray? If so, can you tell me if images captured from the blu-ray version of the film are any higher quality?

In any case, the research continues!