“I don’t want to be buried in a Pet Sematary.”

A spooky little LEGO Halloween diorama featuring my Alice in Wonderland minifigs, and a cemetery terrain which I threw together in a few hours.

Getting the shot for this scene took several dozen takes, and each time I had to experiment with lighting techniques to achieve the dark scene with bright blue highlights. When my traditional gel lighting didn’t quite illuminate the scene as expected, I ran to my electronics kit and quickly assembled a mini LED breadboard “flashlight” with wires and resistors: ultimately I used three separate blue LEDs on wires to light the scene from different angles. The red sky in the background was achieved by pointing a red spotlight towards a maroon cloth backdrop, and the ambient light was done by pointing my white soft box away from the scene. As for the Cheshire Cat, his eyes turned dull orange from the lighting, so I had to correct them by upping the contrast and yellow tint in Photoshop.

For the record, I think Stephen King sucks, the movie was kind of lame (except for Fred Gwynne – he rules), and I’m only luewarm about the Ramones song.