Planting a spaceship on any given environment creates realism that does not need to be exact. We’re not used to looking at spaceships in parking lots, we don’t actually know how it is supposed to look like. Therefore with spaceships we accept realism that doesn’t need to be just right to look right. That’s my theory anyways.

With cars it is a little bit different. If you live in a big city you’ll probably see millions of cars every year. Not all different individual cars but cars from different angles in different circumstances. There’ll be nights, days, rain, maybe snow, winter, summer… you name it. We know exactly how cars are supposed to look like in any given time or place. 

I’ve made some spaceship images over the years but I have this idea that has been with me since the late 1990’s. It’s a story I tried to make but what collapsed under its own weight. I abandoned it long ago. A small part of that project was a substory about a supercar boom here in Finland in the 1960’s and early 1970’s. It was the time of Lamborghini Miura, Ferrari 250 GTO, Porsche 917, Ford GT40, DeTomaso Mangusta, ISO Grifo and more. We never actually had such a boom at all but in my story we did. 

The imaginary Spratt Interceptor sportscar photographed in the summer of 2016 on a road in Norway or Finland. Not really sure anymore which side of the border this was. I still have that model but it needs to be taken apart and repainted. This would be the fourth coat of colour the model has had, each stripped off before laying on a new one. There has been some back and forth with this one before. I’m not sure if it will survive such an operation one more time but I will do it some day.

I tried to capture segments of this particular substory in photographs many years ago with a model I built, the Spratt Interceptor. The model didn’t turn out good enough to do much with. I made a mess with the paintjob, it’s quite nice otherwise. I have procrastinated over this ever since. Earlier this year I decided to get a grip and give it another go with a new model, perhaps one built with more patience. 

My choice was a vintage Revell 1:16 scale Maserati Boomerang kit from the 1980’s. The Maserati Boomerang was a two seater concept car from 1972 and as such was a perfect car for my story. Thinking the unfinished story is still the inspiration.

It is surprising how expensive larger scale vintage model kits can be but this was cheap – for a reason, as it turned out. This was not the best piece of scale model kit engineering I have seen. I had to make many compromises when building it including gluing the doors, bonnet, trunk and pop up headlights shut just to keep the body straight, and replacing the windows with clear sheet plastic. It could also be my relative inexperience in building cars. But in the end, with lights in front and rear, it turned out good enough. 

The 1972 Maserati Boomerang model. Looking at it closer you’ll notice the window on the roof is not sitting right. I accidentally pressed my finger on it while positioning the car for photography and the clear sheet got pushed in. It cannot be straightened by pulling it out with a piece of tape or anything like that. I need to pry the model open and reposition the window from the inside. All the windows are wrong actually. They should sit flush with the exterior but are on the inside of the car. The original clear parts were awful so I had to try to do these from scratch.

Over the course of the summer I photographed some backplates for this particular car, foggy and hazy scenes, my favourites. Here is one that I think works well. There is no story behind this particular photograph. It is just a car on a driveway on a foggy day.

A copper coloured Maserati Boomerang driving on a narrow gravel road surrounded with big old oak trees on a foggy morning.
The Maserati on the Stansvik Manor driveway in Helsinki. Such a lovely place with those big old oak trees. The registration plate on this one is quite obvious. It’s the second model I built for this concept. It could look different actually, we switched from black base and white digits to the style on the model in 1972. If this was real it could have one of those b&w plates too.

Now, I speculated a car would be more difficult than a spaceship to get to look right in real environment because we know how it’s supposed to look like. It might be, I’m just not sure if the Boomerang is the ideal choice to explore this theory with. The Boomerang is rather futuristic, you see, quite small in real life, it messes with the expectations a little methinks.

This was a good start, I will explore this a little more. There are more backplates to work with and another model waiting to be built.

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Tags: scale models