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Overview Ray Harryhausen (1920 -), a master special effects artist, innovated a host of techniques using model-animation and composite cinematography. His trademark Dynamation method made possible a whole genre of science fiction and fantasy filmmaking. Often drawing from Greek and Roman legends, Harryhausen created unprecedented visions of imaginary worlds. By the time he retired in 1981, Dynamation had been surpassed by computer-assisted animation techniques like Go-Motion, and more recently, computer-generated digital animation.
Still, there is no denying Harryhausen's profound influence on motion pictures. With films like Mighty Joe Young (1949); Jason and the Argonauts (1963); and Clash of the Titans (1981), he sparked the imaginations of millions, and influenced a new generation of filmmakers. Lost Worlds and King Kong: The Early Years Ray Harryhausen was born in Los Angeles on June 29, 1920. From the time he could grasp a pencil, young Ray loved to draw and play with modeling clay. His parents, Martha and Fred, encouraged his inclinations, and championed his artistic endeavors all their lives. When Ray was about five, his parents took him to see The Lost World (1925), a fantastic tale about living dinosaurs in the jungles of South America.
The film featured the pioneering stop-motion animation of Willis OBrien, Rays future mentor. Beginning with experimental shorts for the Edison Company in 1914, OBrien, a former newspaper cartoonist, transformed stop-motion animation from a curiosity into an art form. The Lost World was the first feature film to use stop-motion animation with 3 -D figurines Ray became obsessed by dinosaurs, and spent many happy hours conjuring prehistoric creatures with his pencil. Then in 1933 he saw a film that would quite literally change his life. King Kong was Willis Obrien's special effects masterpiece.
Though the film was made on a modest budget, it enthralled audiences around the world, and saved RKO Pictures from bankruptcy. Soon after seeing King Kong, Harryhausen read a Look magazine article detailing the films secrets of stop-motion animation. Borrowing his fathers Victor 16 mm camera, he made a crude stop-motion epic about a boy and his dog who are attacked by a marauding bear. The " bear" was fashioned from his mothers fur coat and a wooden armature.
Ray ingeniously matted out a section of the frame while animating the bear. Later he rewound the negative, cut a counter matte, and filmed himself and his dog cowering from the fantastic creature. Although primitive, this technique was at the core of even the most sophisticated visual effects he produced in later years. Harryhausen continued making films throughout adolescence, casting them with clay dinosaurs and imaginary beasts from outer space. In 1938 his model of a stegosaurus won a competition for young artists sponsored by the Los Angeles Museum of Art. An admiring friend urged him to contact Willis OBrien at M.
G. M. With considerable trepidation Harryhausen called his childhood idol. He was pleasantly surprised to find OBrien friendly and approachable. The animator seemed flattered that anyone took such a passionate interest in his work, and invited Ray to visit his office. Packing his prized dinosaurs in a suitcase, Harryhausen went off for his first meeting with the great man.
OBrien praised Rays efforts, but was also constructively critical. " Youve got to put more character into it, " he said of Rays stegosaurus. " The legs look too much like sausages. " Harryhausen recalled the criticism over forty years later in an interview with Cinefex. It marked the beginning of a long friendship with OBrien. Humbled by his mentors advice, Harryhausen studied musculature and bone structure in anatomy courses at Los Angeles City College. He was fascinated by the subtle interplay between muscle and bone that determined the way an animal moved. In drama classes at U. S.
C. he learned how to imbue his creations with a full range of emotion and expression. He also studied film editing and art direction. In 1942 Harryhausen landed his first professional job at Paramount working on George Pals Pupetoons puppet-cartoon series (a project OBrien also worked on). The schedule was grueling, and the work was tedious and unrewarding. He spent many late nights at the studio, doing little more than changing wooden puppet heads.
Harryhausen was grateful for the training in later years, acknowledging it taught him the importance of meeting deadlines. Enrolling in the Army, Harryhausen was placed in director Frank Capras legendary documentary film unit. Here he put his modeling skills to use on animated instructional films. He also sculpted models of the army's most beloved bungler, the cartoon character Private Snafu. The more he learned about filmmaking, the more anxious he was to again make his own movies.
When the war ended in 1945, Harryhausen eagerly sought his discharge. Using the last of his army pay, he purchased some outdated Koda color film stock, and set up an animation studio in his parents garage. The subsequent Mother Goose Stories became classics of childrens cinema. Harryhausen achieved remarkable results on a shoe-string budget. The film was truly a family enterprise. His father, a machinist by trade, built armatures for the models, and his mother made costumes and papier mache heads.
The charming collection of fairy tales was crafted with sophisticated artistry. Complex tracking and crane shots seamlessly combined with in-camera mattes, endowing the animations with extraordinary realism. The young animator marketed and distributed his film to schools, churches, and libraries across the United States. Over fifty years later it has been translated into numerous languages and is still seen by children around the world. Mighty Joe Young Willis OBrien was greatly impressed by the Mother Goose Stories. He saw that Harryhausen's youthful promise had evolved into an awesome talent.
In 1946 OBrien asked him to be his assistant on a project called Mr. Joseph Young Out of Africa, later shortened to Mighty Joe Young. At the time, Harryhausen was busy with a new series of fairy tales. But he dropped everything for the chance to work alongside the acknowledged master of stop-motion animation. Mighty Joe Young (1949) was perhaps the most ambitious film OBrien ever conceived. Bringing into play all of the special effects techniques he developed over a lifetime, it also promised to be the most costly film he ever made.
OBrien was soon entangled in production and budgeting headaches. Several times the project halted, and it seemed doubtful the film would ever be completed. An exhausted OBrien entrusted more and more of the animation work to Harryhausen. By the time production wrapped, Harryhausen had animated 85 percent of the movie by himself, or with Pete Peterson's occasional help.
Mighty Joe Young is a Kong-like tale of a giant ape run amuck in civilization. Harryhausen studied three live gorillas before attempting models of Joe. His intricately machined armatures, based on actual gorilla anatomy, provided Joe with a fantastic range of motion and expression. Harryhausen worked with four models of different sizes, each one illustrating an aspect of Joes " character. " Some of the animation sequences were so involved it took as long as three days to shoot fifteen seconds of footage. One segment, in which Joe attacks a lions cage, combined rear-screen projection, tracking cameras, and stop-motion animation.
It took a month to film. Mighty Joe Young cost a staggering $ 2, 450, 000 million dollars to produce. Yet its box-office performance was comparatively nominal. Film studios, already wary of televisions growing threat, were drastically slashing budgets. It was unlikely they would fund special-effects films of this scale for decades to come. Despite the wide recognition Harryhausen's work garnered, it appeared his career might be over before it had really begun.
The Beast From 20, 000 Fathoms After Mighty Joe Young, Harryhausen returned to his fairy tale series, completing short films like Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, and King Midas. In 1952 producers Hal Chester and Jack Dietz asked him to do animation and miniature sets for a low budget feature called The Beast From 20, 000 Fathoms. Based on a short story by Harryhausen's friend Ray Bradbury, the film tells the tale of a giant dinosaur that rises out of the East River and destroys Manhattan. Harryhausen was budgeted only $ 7, 000 dollars to produce all of the films effects.
One of his most daunting tasks was finding a way to blend images of his stop-action monster with footage of terrified pedestrians running down the streets. He solved this problem by creating the split-screen technique, a cheap and effective way to make optical composites in-camera. Using the process projector from Mighty Joe Young, he rear projected a live-action frame on a screen. Placing the monster on a platform in front of this, he carefully positioned it with the background.
Next, he used mattes and counter mattes to mask off the platform. As the monster was photographed one frame at a time, the rear projection was correspondingly advanced. After completing the stop-motion sequence, Harryhausen rewound the negative and rear-screen footage. Previously unexposed areas, such as those masked by the shapes of cars and buildings, were now exposed. In the final composite it appeared as if the monster darted behind and in front of skyscrapers, buses, and people. Released in 1953, The Beast From 20, 000 Fathoms cost Warner Brothers $ 650, 000 dollars to produce.
It was one of the years few blockbusters and reaped the studio millions. Furthermore, it firmly established Ray Harryhausen as a low-budget special effects wizard. It Came From Beneath the Sea Hoping to round out his fairy-tale series with a sixth and final film, Harryhausen drew up ambitious plans for a telling of The Tortoise and the Hare. Just as he was about to begin filming, he was introduced to Charles Schneer, an ambitious young producer who wanted to make a film about a giant octopus that invades San Francisco. Harryhausen was captivated by the image of a creature ensnaring the Golden Gate Bridge in its tentacles, and agreed to make the film despite its minuscule $ 150, 000 dollar budget. Money was so tight that Harryhausen created a six-tentacled octopus because it was cheaper to animate!
Despite the limitations, It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955) marked the beginning of a partnership that spanned seventeen years and over a dozen films. Over the next two years Harryhausen and Schneer churned out low budget fodder for the drive-ins. Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), a shoe-string science fiction epic, was redeemed only by Harryhausen's remarkable optical's of force fields and alien spacecraft. Twenty Million Miles to Earth (1957), featured the Ymir, a giant monster from Venus that obliterates the Roman Coliseum.
During this time Harryhausen also worked on Animal World (1956), an animated semi-documentary about dinosaurs. It was his last collaboration with Willis OBrien. The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958) contains some of Harryhausen's best work. The relatively large-budget film was shot in color, and featured an original orchestral score by Bernard Herrmann.
The Arabian Nights inspired tale marked a turning point in the animators artistry. The film is populated with fantastic mythic beasts, including the nightmarish Cyclops; a multi-limbed snake-woman; and a sword-fighting skeleton. While he still relied on his trademark split-screen technique, Harryhausen also used blue-screen backdrops and made composite shots with an optical printer. As part of the films publicity push, producer Schneer officially dubbed Harryhausen's split-screen, stop-motion process Dynamation.
The label remained forever synonymous with Harryhausen's work. Mysterious Island: Harryhausen Moves to England Although Sinbad generated high box-office revenues, Harryhausen and Schneer still had trouble funding their projects. It was becoming prohibitively costly to make the sort of films they envisioned in Hollywood. No longer satisfied to make cut-rate B-movies, in 1959 they moved their operation to London, where costs were cheaper. Harryhausen quickly adopted the new sodium-backing process, a traveling matte technique developed by the British. The process used sodium (yellow) backgrounds and split-beam cameras to create mattes in one exposure.
The different elements were then easily combined in a beam-splitter optical printer. By contrast, the old blue backing technique required as many as ten steps to make one matte. The new method lent superb realism to The Three Worlds of Gulliver (1960), an adaptation of Jonathan Swifts classic satire. Mysterious Island (1961), based on a Jules Verne novel, pits an intrepid band of explorers against an island populated by giant crabs, bees, and birds. As in Gulliver, Harryhausen used every trick at his disposal, including old-fashioned in-camera composites to multiply his single monster bee into a swarm. Harryhausen's work of this period culminated in Jason and the Argonauts (1963), which recounts the myth of Jasons search for the Golden Fleece.
The animator considers Jason among his best work, and even his staunchest critics agree. Nearly two years in production, the film was his most expensive to date. Jason boasted a host of eye-popping Dynamation sequences, including a seven-headed hydra rising from the sea; a nest of vicious harpies; Talos the giant Man of Bronze; and the sea god Triton angrily awakened from his aquatic slumber. Most impressive, perhaps, was the battle between three argonauts and a band of warrior skeletons.
Harryhausen labored four and a half months to animate the seven sword-wielding skeletons. Apart from its outstanding effects, Jason benefited from good acting, a well-written script, and another score from Bernard Herrmann. Although the film did well in Great Britain, it fell flat in America. Audiences were weary from an onslaught of cheap Italian films based on Greco-Roman myths.
Cowboys and Dinosaurs Harryhausen continued producing excellent effects work during the 1960 s, but the overall quality of the projects he chose was uneven. In H. G. Wells tale, First Men in the Moon (1964), his Dynamation sequences dont translate well to the films Pa navision format. One Million Years B. C. (1966), a remake of Hal Roach's 1940 romp, pitted loin-clothed cave dwellers against fierce dinosaurs.
Apart from the films irreconcilable departures from reality, Harryhausen's animation is fetching. The dinosaur battles were beautifully choreographed, and offered new levels of technical perfection. Gang (1969), Harryhausen's last film of the decade, spelled the end monster films box-office supremacy. Based on an unfinished project by Willis OBrien, Gwanji is another " lost-world" piece, pitting cowboys against dinosaurs. Spectacular animation that might have captivated many viewers only a few years earlier, was met largely with indifference. Harryhausen's core audience was growing up and away from his innocent epics.
The animator did not return to production until 1973 when he began work on The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974), sequel to The 7 th Voyage of Sinbad. Although it profited from Harryhausen's masterful Dynamation sequences (including Sinbad's memorable spar with Kali, the six-armed goddess of destruction), it suffered from poor direction and mediocre acting. Nevertheless it did well at the box-office. A final Sinbad sequel appeared in 1977 with Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger. The least appealing of the trilogy, it was addled by poor casting and misdirection. While Harryhausen's animation was beyond reproach, his methods were beginning to seem anachronistic.
Go-Motion and the Twilight of Dynamation In 1977, a young director named George Lucas released a monumental science-fantasy film called Star Wars. John Dykstra, leader of Lucas special effects unit, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), developed a revolutionary stop-motion technique called Go-Motion. Even the most painstakingly conceived stop-motion sequences seem choppy and stilted compared to live action footage. Thats because when an object passes in front of a motion picture camera, its movement is slightly blurred in each frame. When projected, this motion looks fluid and natural. Animators were long aware of this problem, but lacked the tools to solve it.
For Star Wars, Dykstra and his ILM team programmed a computer to control the movement of their models. Every time they exposed a single frame, the computer moved the model slightly, causing it to blur on film. When audiences saw an X-Wing Fighter soar across the screen, its movement was sweeping and smooth. The difference was revolutionary and the public instinctively embraced it.
Star Wars became the largest grossing film of its time. By contrast, Eye of the Tiger disappeared after a short run. Clash of the Titans Although Harryhausen praised Star Wars for its swashbuckling action and broad mythological themes, he resisted Go-Motion technology. In a 1981 interview with Cinefex he criticized the impulse among filmmakers to make animation more lifelike. " Our pictures are more of a surrealistic experience, rather than an excursion into technical perfection, " he said. Harryhausen's last feature film, Clash of the Titans (1981), reflects the limitations of this sensibility. The tale of Perseus slaying of the Medusa was lavished with a $ 15 million-dollar budget.
Most of this money was expended on stiff performances from Sir Laurence Olivier, Dame Maggie Smith, and other luminaries. Harryhausen's Dynamation sequences sometimes dipped beneath his own high standards. The animator complained he simply no longer had the energy to achieve the standards of his earlier years. A notable exception is the terrifying Medusa and her crown of slithering snakes. Although he was proud of his work on the film, he felt it was time to let younger hands take over. A Legacy of Make-believe " Its all an accumulation, " Harryhausen said of the creative process. " Everyone builds their lives on what others have built before them.
Thats what keeps the snowball rolling. " In 1992 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognized Harryhausen's accomplishments with the Gordon E. Sawyer Award for Technical Achievement. Filmmakers George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, whose fantasy epics have enthralled millions, acknowledge a great debt to Harryhausen. As children, he enthralled them with cinematic magic and slight of hand.
As adults, his legacy of low-budget special effects, taught them that with a little imagination, miracles are always possible. Bibliography Books Harryhausen, Ray, Film Fantasy Scrapbook, New York: A. S. Barnes & Co. , 1972. Dunn, Linwood G. , and Turner, George, eds. , The ASC Treasury of Visual Effects, Hollywood: American Society of Cinematographers, 1983 Articles Cox, Vic, " Ray Harryhausen: Acting Without the Lumps, " Cinefex 5, July 1981.
Mandell, Paul, " Harryhausen Animates Annual Sci-Tech Awards, " American Cinematographer, May 1992. Mandell, Paul, " Of Genies and Dragons: The Career of Ray Harryhausen, " American Cinematographer, December 1992. Shay, Don, " Clash of the Foot-Tall Titans, " Cinefex 5, July 1981.
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