When your home is overrun with cardboard boxes thanks to a move, you can store them in the basement, recycle them, or better yet, transform them into your own magical world full of dinosaurs, aliens, sharks, and Jedi.
That's exactly what Lilly and Leon Mackie did to entertain themselves and their newborn son, Orson. Rather than get rid of all their boxes, they built movie sets and props out of them, and other household items, to re-create scenes from their favorite films -- with themselves as the stars.
The parents, along with baby Orson, act out scenes from "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom," "Star Wars," "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," "Home Alone," "The Dark Knight," "Die Hard," "Apollo 13," "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," and more. Then they post photos weekly on their Web site Cardboard Box Office.
"The project began after finding that we had accumulated both a lot of cardboard boxes (due to moving to a new country) and a baby (due to giving birth)," the Mackies write on their Web site. "With our social lives drastically altered we decided to find a way to make some of those housebound weekends a little more fun."
Ironically, their re-creation of an underwater scene from "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" almost looks more like a Wes Anderson film than the original scene. And while scenes from "Alien" and "Jaws" are more adorable than scary, it's interesting to see the baby's facial expressions in all the photos. We can only imagine what thoughts are racing through little Orson's brain as he looks around, from atop a cardboard ship surrounded in blue sheets representing the ocean, to see his father looking frightened by a homemade shark.
Here are some of our favorite photos:
"Jurassic Park"
"Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom"
"Alien"
"Star Wars"
