First thing you need to do is story board the whole thing.
Think of the whole movie like a comic book. What key pictures you want to show would be the frames in your comic book-story board.
You don't have to be an artist. Make simple line drawings of each shot you anticipate. Do it in the form of a comic strip so that you can see the changes and variations from shot to shot.
Try to make comments about shot duration so you can get a sense of the pacing of the presentation.
Your finished video will probably not look too much like the storyboard, but it will be a better production because you took the time for thoughtful planning about what viewers will see on the screen
On this website is a pdf of a storyboard format example.
http://www.knowitall.org/bellsouthdigitalstoryteller/training/prod2.html
here is a storyboard of some action.
http://www.storyboardsinc.com/film.shtml more examples.
Anyhow. Through the use of storyboards you can plan your key scenes, camera angles and show the action you need to show in a little of time as is required for the effect.
Stephen Speilberg said 'creating a picture without storyboards is like standing on a live stage burning onehundred dollar bills.'
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Now shot examples.
Best idea for shot examples is to look at existing works.
Some ideas would be a sky shot displaying the whole battle area and all the ships taking part. This would be a difficult and time consuming scene if you do not make proper preparations. You should have low resolution, medium resolution and high resolution models for all of your shots based on camera distance. Rigging and portholes wont mean a thing to your sky shot if all you can see is a small hull blob and a white propeller wake from up high so a low re model would be easier to use here. Rust and rigging would feature well when you show a close up of a funnel snap and fall over on a high res model.
Another interesting shot would be a shell camera. You would need to think of a camera as a gun round travelling through the air and into an enemy ship. This shot would be great to show a vital hit that one ship has given to another. It's very dramatic. A good effect here is to add some motion blur so that everything but the target's area is slightly blurred to appear more climatic.
Camera shakes for explosions are a good dramatic effect.
Again. Watch movies and pay attention to how the camera moves and it's distance from the scene. How long it stays there and so on.
