Ray Harryhausen

Ray Harryhausen

Raymond Frederick "Ray" Harryhausen (June 29, 1920 – May 7, 2013) was an American-British artist, designer, visual effects creator, writer, and producer who created a form of stop-motion model animation known as "Dynamation".

His most memorable works include the animation on Mighty Joe Young (1949), with his mentor Willis H. O'Brien, which won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects; The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), his first color film; and Jason and the Argonauts (1963), featuring a famous sword fight with seven skeleton warriors. His last film was Clash of the Titans (1981), after which he retired.

Harryhausen moved to the United Kingdom, becoming a dual US-UK citizen and lived in London from 1960 until his death in 2013. During his life, his innovative style of special effects in films inspired numerous filmmakers including George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, John Lasseter, Peter Jackson, John Landis, Joe Dante, Henry Selick, Tim Burton, James Cameron, J.J. Abrams, and Wes Anderson.

If you don't know who Harryhausen was, you've probably seen his work. The master animator is best known for breathing life into giant, writhing serpents, sword-wielding skeletons, and marauding dinosaurs in such fantasy adventure and monster movies as The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), Mysterious Island (1961), Jason and the Argonauts (1963), and Clash of the Titans (1981). Harryhausen was an innovator, and in many ways the father of the modern special effects craft and industry.

Harryhausen's trademark action sequences featuring animated model figurines -- always pictured interacting with, or more often, fighting with human foes, or crushing them, or biting them in half or flying away with them -- might seem clunky and old-fashioned when measured by today's standards. But in their day, the effects Harryhausen pioneered were cutting-edge. He painstakingly filmed his "creatures" frame by frame. The process was exhausting: The 4 minute, 37-second skeleton and human fight sequence from Jason and the Argonauts reportedly took four and a half months to photograph and Harryhausen had to readjust and film around 184,800 movements of the puppets.

Then, using his patented "Dynamation" technique, those skeletons and serpents could interact on screen with actors in a remarkable realistic way. The Dynamation process combined foreground and background footage by photographing miniatures in front of a rear-projection screen. Sometimes, he shot sequences through a partially-masked glass pane. Live footage would later be superimposed on the masked portion of the frame, and voila, the creature or creatures seemed to exist in the midst of "real" human-scaled action, or even appear to move in front of and behind "live" elements. Harryausen also carefully controlled lighting and color balance to make sure the image quality of his animated sequences matched the quality of the live action. His effects were more convincing than the standard use of optical printing and mattes. This was before green screen, folks.

The magic was unlike what anyone had ever seen before.

The fantasies his stop-motion artistry enabled inspired not only Peter Jackson, but George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, Guillermo del Toro and countless other filmmakers. Even if the success of their films -- particularly the trailblazing CGI dinosaurs Spielberg employed in Jurassic Park (1993) -- ended stop-motion animation forever. That said, Jurassic Park incorporated its fair share of animatronic dinosaur heads and giant talons, which may explain why that movie still stands up so well today.

Now, the death on May 7 of stop-motion animation pioneer Ray Harryhausen poignantly brings these issues of real and fake, analog and digital, info focus. Harryhausen's passing represents the end of an era. It closes a crucial chapter in special effects history. It's also a kind of turning point in film technology.