Grand Master - Toy Photography Behind the Scenes

Grand Master, toy photography.

Hello and welcome back to another behind the scenes toy photography video! This week I'm going to show you how to make an entire scene out of nothing but action figures. I call this shot: Grand Master.

I'll also show you my editing process.

For this shot I used Yoda, Battle Droids and Super Battle Droids from Hasbro's Star Wars the Black Series.

I've been rewatching The Clone Wars lately, and while it's not shown very often, I'm always delighted by scenes of Grand Master Yoda in action. This week, I thought I'd create my own scene showing Yoda taking on the droid horde.

He's small and light enough that I was imagining him running over top of the droid army, using the droids as stepping stones and lopping off heads on the way.

To begin my setup, I balanced Yoda on top of a B2 battle Droid, directly in front of my lens, and then used some more B2s to start filling in the background. With the larger droids in place, I filled in the gaps with the smaller B1 Battle Droids. I packed them in nice and tightly so that no gaps were visible in between.

I was lucky enough to get a bunch of these B1s on clearance a few years back, and I used almost all of them to create this scene. I also used a wide aperture to create a shallow depth of field, keeping Yoda in focus, while blurring the foreground and background.

The background image i used was a screenshot from Star Wars Battlefront II and I did my best to match my programmable soft box to the colour in the image. To complete the setup, I added a small LED panel light to create the green glow of Yoda's lighstaber.

Here's my starting image. It turned out pretty dark, but before editing the light levels, I first brushed in the green glow with layer masking and used the pen and brush tools to create the lightsaber blade. After that I added levels and colour balance adjustment layers, making it easier to see the details on Yoda's face.

Next I slightly cropped the image, and then I used content aware fill to remove the articulation joints on my subject.

With a custom brush, I stamped in some sparks under my decapitated droid head, and then added a custom vignette. Finally, I used the dodge and burn tools to fine tune the details on Yoda's face.

So once again, here's my starting image. And here's where I ended up!

Thank you so much for watching.


Music:
The Hunting by FSCM Productions | https://fscmproductions.bandcamp.com
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