Photographer Perfectly Recreates Star Wars Scene With Playset

The photo taken inside the playset makes it look like Moff Gideon is about to come strolling through the corridor.

A photographer perfectly recreated a location from the Star Wars universe by using a playset and some clever lighting.

Matthew Cohen, also known as @shootingthegalaxy, tells PetaPixel that he used Star Wars The Vintage Collection Moff Gideon’s Imperial Light Cruiser Hallway action figure playset by Hasbro to create the realistic shot.

“It’s roughly 1/18 or 3.75-inch scale,” Cohen explains. “Well, it’s actually four of them combined. The set is modular and lets me build it up with as many sets as I have on hand.”

The model is based on Moff Gideon’s cruiser, a set piece that appears in The Mandalorian TV show.

The real movie set from The Mandalorian TV show showing Moff Gideon’s hallway.

Making it Realistic

Cohen didn’t just stick his lens inside the playset, a lot of thought went into the structure and lighting.

“I always try to light my photos like the source material,” says Cohen. “The playset has what I’ve always known as ‘light piping’; transparent pieces that catch light on one side of the toy and illuminate on the other side.”

Playsets tend not to have ceilings, so Cohen improvised by grabbing some metal server housings he happened to have lying around and using them as a roof.

“The vents that were cut out of the side were near-perfect matches to the set from the show,” he adds.

Behind-the-scenes. Lights at the side and top illuminate the playset.

The pillars in the photo serve as the key lights, individually illuminated by eight handheld panel lights. The light coming through the vents from above acts as the fill.

“Just a little bit of light from two larger panel lights hanging directly overhead goes a long way,” says Cohen.

“It has diffusion paper laying on top of it (but I’ve used printer paper for similar setups) to give it the same feeling as the pillar lights.”

The red circular lights in the image required a bit of Photoshop work.

“I took several shots with a small handheld cube light aimed at them. This was done to illuminate them more than they were with just the panels lighting them,” he says.

“In Photoshop, I had to mask those individual elements in. This could have been done in one shot. But it was faster this way as opposed to rigging up eight more lights just for those elements.”

Speaking of Photoshop, Cohen says he has his “own special sauce” but says the final photo is not much different from the RAW.

“The biggest change I made would be color grading it to match the source material a bit more. I added a little more green and blue to my original image,” he adds.

Cohen believes the playset’s reflective floor is what goes a long way to making it feel real. He also says that shooting the photo with plenty of depth, f/16 to f/20, is also important in achieving verisimilitude.

Reaction

Cohen shared his photo on the StarWars sub-Reddit where it received thousands of upvotes.

He says that lighting a scene without any characters is not something he’s done before.

“It gave me a new perspective on lighting without a true subject in a cinematic fashion,” adds Cohen.

Of course, the Star Wars movie franchise often used miniature sets to film some of the epic scenes like in The Phantom Menace.

The miniature set for the famous pod racer scene in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. | Star Wars

Cohen got into toy photography after his fiancè surprised him with an action figure and he saw it as a way of getting into cameras and collecting toys. The gift led to a “dream career” as he now shoots toys full time for one of the largest toy companies in the world: Hasbro.

“I shoot wherever there is space in the house or on some tables in my basement,” he says.

“A lot of toy photography is really just that. Grabbing some toys and seeing what you can make work. TV screens become volume digital sets, Christmas decorations become snowscapes, old computer parts become sci-fi ceilings.

“I still do this in my free time for fun. Experimenting and being crafty and then taking that with me into a professional studio setting and building on what I learned photographing toys on my kitchen table.”

More of Cohen’s work can be found on his Instagram and website.

Image credits: Photographs by Matthew Cohen