Most of my pictures are made with Funko Pops – small vinyl people, with very big heads, available for a huge range of film, television and real life characters. They are easy to transport for location shots, and easy to create interior scenes for because standard dollshouse furniture (1:12 scale) works well with them. I have sometimes used other toys, because they are interesting and allow me to create different kinds of pictures, but they present a whole new set of challenges. Here are the three kinds of figures I have used, to show the differences in scale:
The tiny little Sherlock toys, at the front of the picture above, are made by the very talented Carolina Alkstål, who used to sell them on Etsy. She also made me a tiny Molly and Mary. This enabled me to create scenes which included these characters, which was lovely. The figures are so small, however, that they are quite hard to find suitable props for. This meant that I often had to put them at the front of the picture, with everything else some way behind (and therefore out of focus). It was essential that the figures themselves were as in focus as I could manage with a hand-held iPhone: just look at the amazing detail on Molly’s clothes in these two shots based on The Reichenbach Fall, which seem to me key moments in demonstrating the relationship between Sherlock and Molly.
I wanted to show the two of them in the Bart’s Hospital canteen, as seen in The Blind Banker, but this took a lot of planning. It was easy enough to get hold of dollshouse knives and forks, and the plate of sliced meat decorated with salad was bought too. I had the tiny plates which I had used in other pictures. I was also able to buy the serving trays. I bought the tiny chips (fries), but I made the pasta and sliced pork out of Fimo clay, using a scalpel. The counter is actually the boxes the figures arrived in.
Another key moment between Molly and Sherlock occurs in The Lying Detective, when Molly appears dramatically in an ambulance to test Sherlock for drug abuse, which she does on their way to meet Culverton Smith. The figures are a bit too small for a Playmobil ambulance, but at least I could fit Sherlock inside to recreate the scene:
I took this photo on the path outside my house: if my neighbours aren’t use to my occasional displays of oddity by now, it’s too late!
I was anxious to use the figure of Mary too, and decided to try for the scene with Toby the bloodhound from The Six Thatchers. I had already tried to create the scene with the Funko toys, but since they never made a figure of Mary it seemed incomplete. After a number of attempts to find a toy bloodhound (including one where I didn’t read the eBay description properly and ended up with a cuddly bloodhound over a foot long) I found a “Puppy in my Pocket” toy. For this picture, John had to be carrying baby Rosie in a baby carrier. Rosie was hurriedly constructed from white plasticine, and the carrier from blue ribbon. The bloodhound was still very big compared with the toys, so I deliberately placed him in front and in focus, with the people at the back (this also hid any faults in the baby and carrier!).
So much for creating pictures with very small figures. At the other end of the scale, I commissioned the beautiful large plush figures of Sherlock and John from The Plushie Lady – https://www.deviantart.com/theplushielady – and I absolutely love them. They are too big for most of my usual props, so some imagination had to be deployed.
For the scene at the beginning of His Last Vow, where John finds Sherlock in a drug den (a very clever echo of the scene from the original Conan Doyle story, The Man with the Twisted Lip), I used toy rubbish bins and a supermarket trolley which I think were actually designed to be stationery tidies! In this scene, Sherlock is wearing the dressing gown which the Plushie Lady made for him at my request. You can also see that John’s sweater is embroidered to show the pattern of the knit. I love the fact that the way these toys stand up makes it easy for them to appear confrontational, as though they really are having the row which this picture depicts.
To create an interior of 221B for these toys, I could not use the rooms I had made for the Funkos as they would have been hopelessly out of scale. I started from fresh, finding a paper roughly the colour of the wallpaper around the windows and creating the windows themselves from foiled paper with brown paper cut-outs stuck on top. In this scene from The Hounds of Baskerville, Sherlock is wearing his coat and you can see the detailing on John’s clothes even better. More about the harpoon in another blog.
The curtains are made from unbleached cotton with a hem sewn into the top, which is threaded onto cord. The table and chairs are toys designed to be the right scale for playing with Action Man or similar figures. The radio is a promotional toy made by a well-known radio manufacturer. I made the bison skull on the wall out of Fimo – one of my friends saw it on my table and thought it was an attempt at a model of the female reproductive system, which I now see every time I look at it! It lasted for a couple of pictures before I accidentally broke one of the horns, so I will have to make a new one if I make more of these pictures.
I used the same arrangement for the scene in A Scandal in Belgravia where Sherlock, wrapped in a sheet, talks via the laptop to John, whom he has sent to investigate the death of a hiker in the countryside. Dressing Sherlock for this was easy – a piece of an old pillowcase pinned round him. The books on the table include “The Cat in the Hat” (I like to think Sherlock reads this at home!). I took the plush figure of John into the garden to photograph him, printed it off small and stick it onto the miniature laptop. The scale of the laptop isn’t quite right but I couldn’t find a bigger one!
I would like to create more pictures for the tiny and the large toys, but they take a lot of time and planning. In the meantime, the tiny figures live in their boxes for protection and the larger ones sit on my sofa as part of the household!
Toylocked 