About

Welcome to Cinematic Toys – Lights, Camera, Action Figures. My name is Thorsten and I am a writer as well as composer and photographer. I created Cinematic Toys as a place to showcase and share my toy photography. There are two categories on this blog: Toy Cinema and Transcribed. Toy Cinema posts are toy photos accompanied by my own short stories (a sort of personal writing exercise to bridge periods of downtime where I am not writing professionally). Under transcribed I share personal thoughts on movies, comics, games and such.

Some additional background information:

In 2007 I came across Cédric Delsaux‘s work in Star Wars Insider 92 (February 2007). Cédric takes pictures of Star Wars statues and larger scale figures, compositing them into Parisian urban environments. I don’t have the issue in front of me but I remember reading that he brings all the figures with him on site, photographs them to get the light right, then photographs the scene itself and later on combines it all in scale for a more realistic and dramatic effect. I liked his approach and it gave me some ideas.

While larger figures (usually 1/6th) offer some fantastic details I am more interested in smaller action figures as I enjoy macro photography. So decided to to mainly focus on 3 3/4 figures, not least because of all the fond memories of my Star Wars figures back in the day. I have since accumulated an ever growing number of mostly movie related action figures. However, rather than posing figures in real environments I try to recreate that original movie feeling. I want to create something that could be mistaken, at first glance, for a scene from a movie. My earliest attempts date back to April 2007 and to my surprise my very first photo, this one of Darth Vader, was included right then, right there in Wired.com’s Star War’s 30th Anniversary special.

Equipment wise I am currently using an Olympus E-30 DSLR with a Zuiko 14-54 II as my main lens. In addition I use a Zuiko 70-300 and a Zuiko 50mm F2.0 for macros and close-ups. I also have a portable lighting table/tent for studio and on location shoots. To light my shots I employ various colored LED flashlights mounted to variable mini tripods as well as a LED  ring light.

Although CT serves to showcase my own work I certainly enjoy seeing and sharing the work of other toy photographers as well. Hence I created a companion Flirck group, also called Cinematic Toys. Have a look at the sidebar and you’ll see the latest additions under “CT Flickr Group”. If you take cinematic toy shots as well feel free to join and share your work.

 

Note: All pictures are made available under the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons license, you are free to use them in your own posts accordingly. However, no post shall be republished or printed without my written consent; quotes are certainly permitted.

Disclaimer: I am stating the obvious when remarking that all short stories posted on this site are considered fan-fiction. All entities used are the trademarks of their respective owners. I am neither employed nor affiliated with any such entity owners. I am considering this site a portfolio of my photographic work as well as a showcase of similar work by other photographers.