Ever since recreating "Red vs Blue" and "Aw Shit!" I've thought about shooting "Ninja Attack!" But life got in the way and it just never happened. Today a friend came over to play through Halo 2; once he left, I didn't feel like playing video games anymore (especially Halo), so instead I turned to photography. I dug out all the pieces I thought I would need (as well as a couple of extra pieces that didn't end up making it into the finished photo) and set to work on staging this. I only have one white Spartan, which was a bit of an issue because there are two in the original photo. In the end I decided to make the front Spartan blue; it was more important to me that the background Spartan be white because that just happens to be one of my good friends. Besides, blue works for the whole "red vs blue" war that is Halo multiplayer.
Once that was decided, I set to work. I grabbed one of the large gray cave pieces and decorated it with random flora. The original has a couple of bare branches in the bottom left corner, so I took a couple of the branch pieces from the Dark Forest set Bandit Ambush; unfortunately they never made it into the finished shot (being a macro, they just didn't fit into the frame).
The next problem I had was making the red Spartan hover in the air. In the end I used some clear pieces (which are mostly hidden behind the blue Spartan). I later had the red Spartan standing on a thin 1x3 piece to better hide the clear pieces behind the blue Spartan, which worked rather well.
The background is "In the Woods" which was also used for "None Shall Pass!" I was really excited when I noticed the trees in the original's background. They're rather faint, but they really reminded me of "In the Woods" so I thought that was perfect. Unfortunately I then had to fight with placing it properly. From the angle I shot this, you could see above the actual picture in many of the shots I took (as in "None Shall Pass!" and like "Loading Slave 1," this background is a printed version of "In the Woods." I taped it onto my usual black background, but the printed picture is smaller than my usual background). The cave piece already had to be elevated so you could see it properly from this angle; the background had to be even higher than the cave. Luckily a couple of stacks of books came to the rescue!
The one thing missing from my Lego recreation is the bubble shield. In "Red vs Blue," I used cellophane. I had every intention of doing the same here, but when I tried, I didn't really like the results. I thought that the blurry background that this shot had in macro worked just as well, so I left it at that.
So long story short, the Lego version is just an interpretation of the Halo screenshot. But that's totally okay with me; I'm really happy with how this shot turned out.
As usual, "Ninja Attack!" is on my Flickr photostream.
