This Movie-Loving Instagrammer Locates and Recreates Classic Film Locations

We’re all a bunch of film geeks over at Paste, but we have to give credit where credit is due—sometimes a geek comes along whose devotion to this subject puts our own to shame. This is one of those times.

The geek in question: A guy named Phil Grishayev. For going on four years now, Grishayev has been conducting what he humbly refers to as “a little hobby” on his Instagram account, researching and traveling to the locations of various iconic and less-than-iconic films, where he recreates specific shots by inserting him into the same backgrounds as the characters. The photos are equal parts nerdy and fascinating, as viewers are able to see how locations from some of their favorite films appear in real life, or how they’ve changed over the course of decades.

Grishayev, whose Vimeo page describes him as a “VFX artist, animator, storyboarder, single man,” has certainly been dedicated to the concept since 2014, amassing almost 200 film locations all over the U.S. All kinds of films have gotten his particular brand of tribute, from Back to the Future and Breakfast at Tiffany’s to The Terminator and Rebel Without a Cause. Collected below are some of our favorites, but you can see all 196 by simply visiting the guy’s Instagram and poking around. The series is still going strong, so we look forward to seeing even more film locations in 2018. You can also check out Grishayev’s one-man sci-fi short film Awake on YouTube. It’s a little slice of Blade Runner-style delight that is more than worth your two minutes.