Make a marvellous mini movie scene

Dan Mold uses a macro lens and LED lights to capture a Marvel film-like image of a tiny action figure in the kitchen

- Dan Mold

Whether you’re a parent or grandparent to young children – or simply a big kid yourself – it’s likely your home is littered with toys. But before you pack everything away after playtime, consider whether there are any photogenic subjects that could be used to create a faux cinematic film still.

Toy photography is a relatively niche genre, but even if it’s not something you choose to pursue, it’s a great way to practise close-up photography, experiment with artificial LED lighting and finesse your skills with a macro lens.

Once you’ve chosen your subject, you can use it to inform the scene you’re going to create. We used a small figurine of Marvel superhero Ant-Man, which presented endless opportunities around the house, because the character can shrink down to almost any size and lives within the real world. However, if you simply want to copy our setup but don’t have the same toy, you could use a similarly-sized plastic action figure or Lego mini figure instead.

Our concept was to have Ant-Man running away from a knife chopping lettuce. The falling lettuce leaves were created by shooting multiple identical compositions via an interval timer, while physically dropping chunks of lettuce into the frame.

We carefully went through all our shots and chose the best frames to merge together in post-production when we were back at our computer, and used Layer Masks in Photoshop CC to finish off our composite.