One Night Stand

One Night Stand

This is about a fictional last stand made by a rag-tag group of German soldiers somewhere in Berlin during the last days of the Reich. The setting is in a cross-road within the eastern part of the war-torn capital. The time, moments before dusk and hours before they go down in history…in a one night stand.




German Officer: “In about two hours after dusk, the entire Russian army will be marching down this road. We are among the few remaining who stands between them and the complete defeat of the Reich. Honestly, we cannot stop the whole Russian army but I can’t think of a more honorable way to do than to spend my last breath fighting for the fatherland (we call it motherland here).”


This tank was summoned from the nearby testing grounds. If the night-fighting capability it is supposed to have is indeed true, then this will be the best time and place to test it.




While the main group discusses their plan, some more soldiers arrive to join them, picking weapons along the way left by others on the wayside.


Some furniture lay covered in the debris inside this abandoned furniture factory.


I completed this diorama last Sunday night but with the batteries of my camera was almost dying and without a good light source, I did not take pictures. Last night however, I decided to try and took the pictures until the batteries got exhausted. Making the most of my small lamp shades, the pictures did not come out as I hoped they would. So, I must retake the pictures under natural outside light this weekend.

There are basically problems that I noted about this work and these are:

1. I should have added some more debris (probably mounds of it) as the size of the ruin would certainly mean that tons of debris should be present.
2. The color of the debris (especially of powdered bricks) did not match the color of the bricks on the wall.
3. I think I over-estimated the required space for this diorama that it turned out to be quite large as far as the base is concerned. Actually it is my largest diorama so far in terms of the size of the base.
4. As I meant to be simply a representation of what I have in mind, I neither took the time to research to make it more accurate depiction of something that would happen in the mentioned time and place.

Anyway, rather than redo or modify the diorama, I just considered these as “lessons learned” that I may apply in my next works.