I work almost exclusively in my tiny 650-square-foot apartment. That I share with my wife, dog, and parrot. But, I don’t need much space for creating my own little worlds.

For example, the trees making up Agora Forest are cut strips of paper that I lightly textured with markers.

And, when I shoot self-portraits, I’m often in the dead space of my apartment: the halls and footpaths that can’t have anything permanently there.

… I’ve been rereading Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (2011). And it was Chapter Six—“Becoming a Part of Something Bigger Than Ourselves”—that caught my attention the most this read through. The epic scale that video games provide.

An awe-inspiring technical feat I experienced playing on tiny screens, like The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening on the Gameboy’s 2.6-inch screen. A world that felt vast while fitting in a pocket.

It’s gotten me to thinking about how to build upon my work to create a world that feels epic.

Photography has a distinct advantage to other traditional visual media: scale is entirely relative. We have cameras powerful enough to capture molecules to be projected in classroom auditoriums.

Two-dimensional media has another advantage: the depth is illusionary. A feature animators exploited with the multiplane camera [Walt Disney's MultiPlane Camera (1957)]. A multiplane camera, as the name implies, is a camera that takes photographs of multiple planes.

Which, you may be thinking, isn’t that all cameras? The bokeh effect works because different planes are in and out of focus. With a multiplane camera, different animated planes are being moved at different velocities to give the effect of moving through a three-dimensional space: the furthest background moves much slower than the things in the foreground.

Knowing this, how can I proceed?

Dioramas. As a child, I built these in shoe boxes. Little setbuilding activities.

As a proof of concept, I printed off some tiny-scale self-portraits and 8x10” public domain architecture illustrations. I cutout the portraits and used one of the illustrations as a framing tool.

These are very rough. I’m hand-holding the frame sheet, so there was some amount of movement. With it being such a closeup shoot, these tiny motions will appear soft. For a more durable edition, I’d likely scale up and reinforce it either by mounting to a thick, clear plastic and/or building an easel back.