"Substantial creativity" may get you past being a derivative work in Europe, but not in the US. Copyright law differs between jurisdictions. You'd have to be very careful.
I like the original idea. What I'd do is make sure the resulting images don't have any significant reliance on any small set of originals. So if challenged, you could re-create the scene w/o the challenged images and show a court that the scene is not closely derived from any single source.
