Photographer Perfectly Matches Movie Scenes With Their Real-Life Locations — See the Pictures! (Exclusive)

Twenty-four year old Thomas Duke has gone viral for finding the places behind iconic film scenes — from 'The Notebook' to 'Lizzie McGuire'

​​When Thomas Duke travels to a new city, he sees iconic movie scenes everywhere he goes — and brings them to life with his film-inspired photography.

The London-based artist, 24, runs an Instagram account called @SteppingThroughFilm, where he shares pictures he snapped in the places where movies were filmed or based. With over 300,000 followers, Duke has made a name for himself on social media thanks to his transportive style of camerawork. He holds a postcard-sized print of a scene in front of his camera at the spot where it was shot, lining up all the details, from building corners to tree trunks, to create a visual of two worlds overlapping.

“I just love escaping to that other universe,” Duke, who started chronicling his cinematically inspired travels on social media in 2017 at just 18, tells PEOPLE. “That's exactly why I love doing it and why I called it Stepping Through Film, because it's stepping through another world, stepping through another story.”

A cinephile since childhood, Duke has never felt that movies were merely confined to screens. “I've always loved losing myself in cinema, just enjoying the stories that I'm told and relating to so many different characters,” says the creative, who grew up just outside of London, in the county of Hertfordshire.

It’s no wonder that Duke went on to study film at Brunel University, though he made some of his best memories off campus. With little interest in “going out partying” with fellow students, he began traveling, taking trips to various destinations that intrigued him. Naturally, Duke was inclined to visit — and photograph — the backdrops to his favorite films.

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His first on-site post was captured at Windsor Great Park, where the fairytale musical Into the Woods was filmed in 2014. He photographed the exact waterfall where Chris Pine and Billy Magnussen performed their song “Agony,” a scene that stuck with Duke “for a long, long time,” as he explained in the post’s caption.

Over the years, @SteppingThroughFilm has become so popular, it's opening a world of professional opportunities. Duke consistently tags actors and filmmakers in his posts, and eventually they started recognizing and reposting his work, steadily increasing the popularity of his page. He’s now pursuing the project as a full-time career, partnering with production companies to create paid promotional content.

“It’s very surreal … I never imagined that would've happened, and it's just about celebrating the film through the scenes and just photography,” says Duke.

He’s also been able to chat face-to-face with some of the biggest names in film. He has interviewed actors and directors, and most recently, Duke joined the cast of Oppenheimer on their press tour. “It was less about locations and more about presenting and celebrating a release,” says Duke, who hopes to do more on-camera interview work in the future.

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In the meantime, Duke’s enjoying the jet-setting that his passion-turned-profession allows. He’s traveled all around the United Kingdom. He’s gone stateside to photograph New York City as it's shown in Elf and The Devil Wears Prada, and he ventured down to South Carolina to step into The Notebook and Forrest Gump. In Italy, Duke lived out The Lizzie McGuire Movie in Rome and The Twilight Saga: New Moon in Montepulciano.

Some movie locations are far easier to find than others, but that doesn’t stop Duke from chasing the scenes. He’s always had a particular fondness for Pixar animations: “I just loved the escapism they brought, and they always felt like they had a real sense of high-quality storytelling for adults and kids,” he says.

Duke visited Cinque Terre, a group of towns on the Italian Riviera, in an effort to photograph the places that inspired the 2021 Pixar hit Luca. He conducted “as much research as possible” before flying out to find his perfect shots. “I basically watched all the behind-the-scenes features from the film, read some articles, listened to the director who talked about the inspiration … and I just went on Google Maps and looked at each town,” he explained.

Unlike when he photographed scenes from Ratatouille on the streets of Paris, Duke had to explore several villages on the coast before he found landmarks to line up with his printed screen grab from the film.

“It was just a case of walking around for a couple of days, trying to find similar aspects and where the Pixar team kind of went for research. So that took a long time,” he recalls. Eventually his efforts paid off, and he found a spot that matched his photo. Some of the animators even commented to confirm that he’d found the right spot, and the official Pixar Instagram account reposted Duke’s photo — hardly the first time he’s gotten major recognition for his work.

“I still have to pinch myself every day to be talking to Disney and Universal about movies,” says Duke. “It doesn't feel like a job at all. It's just amazing.”

Even as he “steps through” the world of other people’s stories, Duke has still found a way to tell his own. He’s learned that his work most resonates with followers when he shares how films have personally changed his life, like how LGTBQ+ drama Love, Simon helped him come out as gay.

“It's always lovely to hear people say, "Oh, that also helped me,” and ‘Thanks, your coming out helped and stuff." And I was only able to do that due to a film,” Duke says. “Film as a whole, it's become more than locations. It's become just celebrating life and stories.”

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