Besides working on the casting flaws noted above, I'd shoot any and all adults from, at most, the eye level of the tallest child. I'd link sounds to the map, so we hear locations before the zoom in or even when the focus simply passes an area without zooming.
I fear some readers may deem such things obtrusive or anachronistic, but tech should also give credible ambient sound, mostly lacking in the existing TV serial: boats' creaking, water lapping, birds' calls and chatter day and night, the breeze, the sails' flap, rainfall, the audio differences between day and night, etc., etc., and more that I can't imagine because, though I've read, I've never been. "Live" coloring shows the tide creeping up and down the map. The camera zooms in and out, computer tech allowing the near zooms to morph into live action and zoom-outs to morph back to the map, so that we always know where we are. First of all, as with the books, each film would need a map, not just bracketing the action, but ever-present. While I waited for the DVD to arrive, I did my best to imagine how I'd have filmed Ransome, whether the two Coot stories and Great Northern?, which belongs with them thematically, or the Lakeland books. Bicycles, land routes, like sci-fi wormholes, cheat time. In the books, it's fascinating how quickly a child on a bicycle can shortcut a winding river journey: Time flows differently on water, on shore.
But there's little sense of travel, of space. To an American who's never crossed an ocean, the shots of the narrow rivers and wide waters, the tidal play, bridges, and shallows, the boats and barges, make up for a great deal. Dick, same size as Port and Starboard, is deus ex machina, humorless Sherlock Jr., and little more. Here, she's the tallest child and seems so much older and more sedate than the rest that the obsessive sibling relationship hardly registers.
His sister protects, worships, and dotes on him to an extent that might seem unnatural were they the least bit older. Dick's a nascent Stephen Maturin, obsessed with nearly anything observable or calculable, even sailing which he conquers by thinking out every move, sometimes too slowly for the quirks of the breeze. The prose Coot Club's point of view characters are Dick and Dorothea Callum. An extra shot or two showing them sailing with their father might have remedied, but really they needed to be bigger. There's no real sense of loss when they can't come along, as there is in the novel where they seem Tom's equals. Port and Starboard come across too tiny, or too trivial. While the Death and Glory crew feel about right, Tom's too pudgy for an active kid and never quite as brave or as frightened as circumstances call for. I went into this and its sequel, The Big Six, with great trepidation.
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