How do you make a dio of a sniper when you aren’t supposed to see the sniper?[%-)] Has anyone had this idea before. My idea was to have the 88mm dio idea I posted before and then have a sniper dug in a hole under the Hedgehrows. Would this be logical.
David
Dug into the hedgerow wouldn’t be a good place for a sniper. All he would see was what was right in front of him in the opposite hedgerow. Snipers are usually in a high place that has a good view of the ground in front of him. A tree or a second floor window would be better.
You do have a point, but in a tree how would you be able to see the sniper or would it just be the dioramas secret.
David
What if you did a cutaway scene, that deliberately illustated the sniper and his position, as a way of showing their craft ?
Another approach is a placard that indicates that “The officer near the____ is going to meet his end without any warning. Can you see why?” This might encourage folks to scour the diorama more closely for clues, and thus reveal the hidden sniper.
Just a few thoughts.
The placard Idea is a great idea. Maybe put “I spy a sniper, do you” but how would I replicate the suit worn by the snipers with the twigs and leaves on them.
David
I’ve actually been planning this exact same thing. I would suggest to do a cut away where the sniper is hidden from all three sides. What I’m thinking of doing is a church tower with a removeable side and a shuttered window. As for the suit, I would suggest camouflage netting for a smaller scale with small colored pieces of cloth or paper in it.
Paint everything in black and white except for the sniper.
wash out and pale the colors more as the distance from the sniper increases.
something that might be tough to picture and may be quite subtle but may be worth the effort: shade the settings as if the sniper was an inverse point light source. that is, all the shadows face the sniper.
now, obviously these are not going to look realistic if that’s what you’re looking for but it’d probably look cool in a stylized sort of way.
Great idea, but it might be kinda hard to pull of given the scope required for good depth. A forced perspective might be an idea, where you look over the shoulder of a sniper in a consealed position as he looks down on an 88 in a field.
Forced perspective dios are really hard to pull off though…
Carnivalfun, that seems like a good way to do that but are you using the church steeple only or making a whole church and using it like that. Or, should I make a tree and make one side with all the leaves off and one side with the leaves on to show the snipers craft like Kolschey said.
David
I’m just going to do the steeple because its a 120mm figure. The idea with the tree sounds pretty good
Wow, that would be really hard, but would look incredible if someone pulled it off. Anyways, yeah, IYAAYAS beat me to it. Unless your dio was huge, I dont think you could accurately portray the scale. Snipers wouldnt ussually be going after targets very close to them, so even in a scale like 1/35, to show what a snipers long distance sharpshooting role was, you would have to have a really big dio. Whatever you decide, I think it will come out great.
In one of the back issues of FSM there is a sniper dio. with the sniper hiding in a building. Finding him was half the fun of the pic. I think it was Spetznaz in Chechniya or something along those lines.
Sniper’s have a tendancy to use simple cammoflage effects such as twigs and leaves, The tree idea is really good because he is using elevation to see in any direction. They would clear an area infront of the rifle of leaves and twigs and use them as cammo. They keep the barrel inside the tree just a bit so the muzzle flash doesn’t give away their position try drapping a faked burlap bag or tarp over the rifle cause it keeps it from being seen.make the tree a little dense and partially thick and have him resting in the tree looking at the other figures about to be sniped on the 88.
make a big messy diorama with trees, bushes, tall grass, ruined walls, mounds of debris etc. don’t put a sniper in there and challenge people to find one.
perhaps the movie enemy at the gates would give you the inspiration yo need.or the sniper scene from saving private ryan?
As for camo it all depends on theater and war, if its a WWII german sniper they would be wearing a face veil(black mesh) and a snipers smock with some improvised camo, twigs, leaves, etc. If its a WWII american sniper your portraying then their gear is even more basic, mostly feild improvised because our military was only in the begining stages of astablishing sniper programs. After WWII you’ll see the Ghillie suit a lot more (as well as in WWI)…If its a russian sniper then you can get pretty creative, the russians had the best training programs for snipers in WWII, plus with a dio you could portray more shorter range sniping, often building to building shooting. Japanese sniping was very improvised, however their gear was somewhat more suited to the idea, their weapons…the type 97 w/ 2.5 power scope…used underpowered cartriges so the charge burned up in the barrel eliminating most if not all muzzle flash…but shortened their range, so this may be a good way to demonstrate sniping in a smaller dio.
Its a pretty interesting idea, i’ve thought about it a few times, i was thinking about putting my sniper on a rooftop or bridge beam on a kind of “March to Berlin” urban combat theme, with the black mesh veil and mesh rifle cover…
please don’t watch that. all that movie ever enspired me to do was a) change the channel and b) kicking jude law in the nuts for being in that disgraceful piece of crap.
What about putting a wounded/dead figure on the ground and then having a couple of other scared figures hiding and pointing toward where the shot came from? Remember the scene in…I must kneel while typing this…[bow]“Full Metal Jacket”[bow]where the guy was lying on the ground in the city scene and the woman sniper kept hiting him to tempt the others outof hiding? That’d be a good place to start, in my mind…
make TWO vignettes. one the sniper, the other the target. set them up across the room from each other to keep things in scale.
A cool idea might be to make a ruined two story house with a tree that fell onto the second floor and the sniper is using the tree as cover on the second floor.