Reference artist/Photographer

This series of photographs was inspired by the Aero Director/ VFX artist Sam O’Hare’s short film, The Sandpit. This winning film of Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction 2010 made use of a time-lapse, tilt shift photography to create a stop motion video. While watching the awe-inspiring video, I was thinking what if some giant is really looking at us as miniature and probably laughing at our mentality for thinking how smart and great we thought we are. From there, I came out with the idea of creating a series of photographs to represent that idea.

The Sandpit from Sam O'Hare on Vimeo.

Research/Idea Development

On creating miniature effect:

Before starting the project, I YouTubed and Googled on several videos and pictures that uses tilt-shift photography and look at how it is done. Knowing that I couldn’t afford the tilt-shift lens, I’ve read up and watched some videos on how to create the similar effect using photoshop.

Everything else was just random shootings with intention of creating nice tilt-shift miniature effect and choosing what goes and looks best.

On the background/items the miniature was placed at:

Initially I wanted to place the ‘miniature sets’ in toy boxes, so to try it out, I’ve Googled ‘Toy Boxes’ to my pleasant surprise I see wooden boxes to put the toys in (like the one in toy story) instead of the packaging cardboard boxes which I intended to use. This gave me an idea that whatever boxes would actually do well and would be easier to implement ‘realistically’ than using the packaging cardboard boxes, which I do not have, and difficult to place a fake ‘plastic sheet’ over the miniature which allows us to see through.