Initially, I was intending to use shin-mitate-e to recreate some scenes from the Dune movies. However, thinking that I might get into legal jeopardy in regards a very well protected IP, it might not be such a great idea to just clumsily plod into that minefield.
However, I had already bought some potato chips and wanted to see if I could actually create a desert scene. I’d noticed that Tatsuya Tanaka had previously made a fantastic desert scene with crinkle cut potato chips, however, I thought I’d try not to copy his idea completely, this is SHIN mitate-e (SHIN meaning “new”) after all. So I created the following scene on a plate and attached my 12 mm extension tube to my 85 mm Zeiss lens, thus creating a reasonably believable scale and depth of field to the photography.
And then proceeded to experiment with speed light settings, depth of field and of course all the different configurations of potato chips. The result was a creation of two lovers sitting on a sand dune on my fictitious potato chip planet. Hence, the fake book cover – “The Spice Lovers”
Next I set about creating some action scenes. Firstly the “Bun Rider”, which I thought was pretty amusing (if not also a little close to ‘Bum Rider” and the possible connotations of that title). However, I was very pleased with the resulting mix of photography and graphics. But also wanted to see if a cheese puff would work on this scale too. I think the “Bun Rider” concept is the strongest, but quite liked the graphic made for my “Cheese Puff Rider” too.
In hindsight, I should have tied some black thread to to the plastic figure (made out of an unpainted white model railway figure and robes made out of black masking tape cut and folded). Well, there’s still time to create a series of shots that I think I’ll mint as a limited edition NFT collection.
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