The Little World

It’s the sober version of ” Hold my beer…” but you can get into just as much trouble anyway.

I have a plan. So, you’ll reflect, did Ludendorff ( and didn’t that work out well…), but I hasten to add mine is peaceful and productive. And it revolves around something that revolves around.

Okay, enough preparation. Here’s the idea. I take pictures of the model aircraft and cars in my collection and make series stories about them. – a great deal of what I do is for the tabletop camera. With the cars there are a number of things that you can do to make them look as if they are real and in motion – some on the table and some in the computer. The same is true for aircraft, but the problems can be harder to solve. One of the current quests is to reproduce the look of a moving propeller.

There have been a lot of attempts at this and only a few of them have been successful. I’ve not yet satisfied my own eye in this regard – but I have determined that you can’t really do it with the static prop in place in front of the aircraft ( Or in back, if you are modelling a B-36. ). I suspect the best answer is going to be to use a combination of a clear or translucent plastic disc and Photoshop.

To this end I am trying to make all my prop-driven models with removable propellers – just holding them into place for shots on the tarmac with a blob of sticky gum. When the time comes to shoot them flying, I hope to replace the static prop with the appropriate disc. In the case of shots planned from the front of the aircraft I’ll need to see the engine crankcase.

The new Nakajima ‘ Kate ‘ is one such case. I have one crankcase to go onto the engine with the still prop and need another for the working shot. So I determined to duplicate it before I glue it in place. Cue blob of plasticine, steel nut as a casting box, and a couple of drops of casting resin. I used the kit part as master model, made a mould, and filled it. Ultimately the crankcase will have a propeller hub and the disc in front of it and be able to substitute for the still part.

I’ll need to do this for the spinner of a number of new models before they are glued to the props.

Note that the experiment has a further stage; I’ll need to have removable or retractable landing gear for the models or just Photoshop the extended gear in the final shot. Airfix have provided gear up and gear down, as well as flap up and flap down options and I’m going to keep them all separate to make up a Nakajima ‘ Kate kit ‘ for the studio.