Ray Harryhausen

Raymond Frederick Harryhausen (June 29, 1920 – May 7, 2013) was an American-British animator and special effects creator who created a form of stop motion model animation known as "Dynamation". His works include the animation for '' Mighty Joe Young'' (1949) with his mentor Willis H. O'Brien (for which the latter won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects); his first color film, ''The 7th Voyage of Sinbad'' (1958); and '' Jason and the Argonauts'' (1963), which featured a sword fight with seven skeleton warriors. His last film was '' Clash of the Titans'' (1981), after which he retired.

In 1960, Harryhausen moved to the United Kingdom and became a dual American-British citizen. He lived in London until his death in 2013. During his life, his innovative style of special effects in films inspired numerous filmmakers. In November 2016 the BFI compiled a list of those present-day filmmakers who claim to have been inspired by Harryhausen, including Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, Joe Dante, Tim Burton, Nick Park, James Cameron, and Guillermo del Toro. Others influenced by him include George Lucas, John Lasseter, John Landis, Henry Selick, J. J. Abrams, and Wes Anderson.

Early life

Harryhausen was born in Los Angeles, California, the son of Martha L. (née Reske) and Frederick W. Harryhausen. Of German descent, the family surname was originally spelled "Herrenhausen".

Life and career

1930s and 1940s

After having seen ''King Kong'' (1933) on its initial release for the first of many times, Harryhausen spent his early years experimenting in the production of animated shorts, inspired by the burgeoning science fiction literary genre of the period. The scenes utilising stop-motion animation (or model animation), those featuring creatures on the island or Kong, were the work of pioneer model animator Willis O'Brien. His work in ''King Kong'' inspired Harryhausen, and a friend arranged a meeting with O'Brien for him. O'Brien critiqued Harryhausen's early models and urged him to take classes in graphic arts and sculpture to hone his skills. Taking O'Brien's advice, while still at high school, Harryhausen took evening classes in art direction, photography and editing at the newly formed School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, where he would later serve as a lecturer. Meanwhile, he became friends with an aspiring writer, Ray Bradbury, with similar enthusiasms. Bradbury and Harryhausen joined the Los Angeles chapter of the Science Fiction League (now the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society), Bradbury in 1937, Harryhausen in 1939, where they met Forrest J Ackerman; and the three became lifelong friends.

After studying art and anatomy at Los Angeles City College, Harryhausen secured his first commercial model-animation job, on George Pal's ''Puppetoons'' shorts, based on viewing his first formal demo reel of fighting dinosaurs from a project called ''Evolution of the World'', which was never finished.

During World War II, Harryhausen served in the United States Army Special Services Division under Colonel Frank Capra, as a loader, clapper boy, gofer and later camera assistant, whilst working at home animating short films about the use and development of military equipment. During this time, he also worked with composer Dimitri Tiomkin and Ted Geisel ("Dr. Seuss surplus film from which he made a series of fairy tale-based shorts, which he called his "teething-rings".

In 1947, Harryhausen was hired as an assistant animator (credited as "First technician, Special Effects") on what turned out to be his first major film, '' Mighty Joe Young'' (1949).

1950s

The first film with Ray Harryhausen in full charge of technical effects was ''The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms'' (1953) which began development under the working title ''Monster From the Sea''. The filmmakers learned that a long-time friend of Harryhausen, writer Ray Bradbury, had sold a short story called "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" (later re-titled "The Fog Horn") to ''The Saturday Evening Post'', about a dinosaur drawn to a lone lighthouse by its foghorn. Because the story for Harryhausen's film featured a similar scene, the film studio bought the rights to Bradbury's story to avoid any potential legal problems. Also, the title was changed back to ''The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms''. Under that title, it became Harryhausen's first solo feature film effort, and a major international box-office hit for Warner Brothers.

It was on ''The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms'' that Harryhausen first used a technique he created called "Dynamation" that split the background and foreground of pre-shot live action footage into two separate images into which he would animate a model or models, seemingly integrating the live-action with the models. The background would be used as a miniature rear-screen with his models animated in front of it, re-photographed with an animation-capable camera to combine those two elements together, the foreground element matted out to leave a black space. Then the film was rewound, and everything except the foreground element matted out so that the foreground element would now photograph in the previously blacked out area. This created the effect that the animated model was "sandwiched" in between the two live action elements, right into the final live action scene.

In most of Harryhausen's films, model animated characters interact with, and are a part of, the live action world, with the idea that they will cease to call attention to themselves as only "animation." Most of the effects shots in his earliest films were created via Harryhausen's careful frame-by-frame control of the lighting of both the set and the projector. This dramatically reduced much of degradation common in the use of back-projection or the creation of dupe negatives via the use of an optical printer. Harryhausen's use of diffused glass to soften the sharpness of light on the animated elements allowed the matching of the soft background plates far more successfully than Willis O'Brien had achieved in his early films, allowing Harryhausen to match live and miniature elements seamlessly in most of his shots. By developing and executing most of this miniature work himself, Harryhausen saved money, while maintaining full technical control.

A few years later, when Harryhausen began working with color film to make ''The 7th Voyage of Sinbad'', he experimented extensively with color film stocks to overcome the color-balance-shift problems. Ray's producer/partner Charles H. Schneer coined the word Dynamation as a "merchandising term" (modifying it to "SuperDynaMation" and then "Dynarama" for some subsequent films).

Harryhausen was always heavily involved in the pre-production conceptualizing of each film's story, script development, art-direction, design, storyboards, and general tone of his films, as much as any ''auteur'' director would have on any other film, which any "director" of Harryhausen's films had to understand and agree to work under. The complexities of the Directors Guild of America's rules prevented Harryhausen from being credited as the director of his films, resulting in the more modest credits he had in most of his films.

Throughout most of his career, Harryhausen's work was a sort of family affair. His father did the machining of the metal armatures (based on his son's designs) that were the skeletons for the models and allowed them to keep their position, while his mother assisted with some miniature costumes. After Harryhausen's father died in 1973, Harryhausen contracted his armature work out to another machinist. An occasional assistant, George Lofgren, a taxidermist, assisted Harryhausen with the creation of furred creatures. Another associate, Willis Cook, built some of Harryhausen's miniature sets. Other than that, Harryhausen worked generally alone to produce almost all of the animation for his films.

The same year that ''Beast'' was released, 1953, fledgling film producer Irwin Allen released a live action documentary about life in the oceans titled '' The Sea Around Us'', which won an Oscar for best documentary feature film of that year. Allen's and Harryhausen's paths would cross three years later, on Allen's sequel to this film.

Harryhausen soon met and began a fruitful partnership with producer Charles H. Schneer, who was working with the Sam Katzman B-picture unit of Columbia Pictures. Their first tandem project was ''It Came from Beneath the Sea'' (a.k.a. ''Monster from Beneath the Sea'', 1955), about a giant octopus attacking San Francisco. It was a box-office success, quickly followed by ''Earth vs. the Flying Saucers'' (1956), set in Washington D.C. – one of the best of the alien invasion films of the 1950s, and also a box office hit.

In 1954, Irwin Allen had started work on a second feature-length documentary film, this one about animal life on land called '' The Animal World'' (completed in 1956). Needing an opening sequence about dinosaurs, Allen hired premier model animator Willis O'Brien to animate the dinosaurs, but then gave him an practically impossibly short production schedule. O'Brien again hired Harryhausen to help with animation to complete the eight-minute sequence. It was Harryhausen's and O'Brien's first and only professional full-color work. Most viewers agree that the dinosaur sequence of ''Animal World'' was the best part of the entire movie (''Animal World'' is available on the DVD release of O'Brien's 1957 film '' The Black Scorpion'').

Harryhausen then returned to Columbia and Charles Schneer to make '' 20 Million Miles to Earth'' (1957), about an American spaceship returning from the planet Venus. The spaceship crashes into the sea near Sicily, releasing an on-board alien egg specimen which washes up on shore. The egg soon hatches a creature that, in Earth's atmosphere, rapidly grows to gigantic size and terrifies the citizens of Rome. Harryhausen refined and improved his already-considerable ability at establishing emotional characterizations in the face of his Venusian ''Ymir'' model, creating yet another international box office hit.

Schneer was eager to graduate to full-color films. Reluctant at first, Harryhausen managed to develop the systems necessary to maintain proper color balances for his DynaMation process, resulting in his biggest hit of the 1950s, ''The 7th Voyage of Sinbad'' (1958). The top-grossing film of that summer, and one of the top-grossing films of that year, Schneer and Harryhausen signed another deal with Columbia for four more color films.

1960s

After ''The 3 Worlds of Gulliver'' (1960) and ''Mysterious Island'' (1961), both great artistic and technical successes, and successful at the box office, according to Harryhausen, who stated in the DVD and Blu-ray featurette about the making of ''Mysterious Island'': "''Mysterious Island'' was one of the most successful films that we made and I am glad people are still enjoying it today". And ''Gulliver'' "made its profits" as Ray is quoted in Jeff Rovin's bio-book ''From The Land Beyond Beyond: The Making of the Movie Monsters You've Known and Loved – The Films of Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen''. His next film is considered by film historians and fans as Harryhausen's masterwork, '' Jason and the Argonauts'' (1963). Among the film's several celebrated animation sequences is an extended fight between three actors and seven living skeletons, a considerable advance on the single-skeleton fight scene in ''Sinbad''. This stop-motion sequence took over four months to complete.

Harryhausen next made ''First Men in the Moon'' (1964), his only film made in the 2.35:1 widescreen (a.k.a. " CinemaScope") format, based on the novel by H. G. Wells