Ray Harryhausen

Ray Harryhausen was born in 1920, in Los Angeles. Although born in America he is still considered to be British. At the age of 13 he saw the movie King Kong, made by Willis O’ Brien. Ray Harryhausen was inspired by this film and decided that it was what he wanted to do in life, he eventually became Willis O’ Brien’s assistant.

            To improve his drawings he put himself through art school, and for much of his later work he used a technique known as Aerial Perspective (objects in the background are faded and objects in the foreground where darker) this made it possible to show various layers in a drawing. He made very detailed and complicated storyboards for all of his planning. For each of the movies he made he did a detailed storyboard first, then he would do initial concept design and then he would build the models so that they were fully articulated. Aerial Perspective helped show where the characters in the scene would go. The movies Ray made where ‘creature features’, as this was the most popular type of film, and so it was likely that more people would see the film.

            The characters that Ray made for his films where made of plasticine with wire frames to help them to keep there shape. When filming Ray didn’t use a green screen for his work, but he did use perspective so all his models where the same size but some looked bigger as brought them closer to the camera.

10) Stop frame animation

This is a fairly old form of animation that involves taking several photos that have something slightly changed in each picture, this is common with clay as people can mould the clay into different positions that can mimic movement. There are 24 frames to a second of film and therefore each stop frame animation is made up of still images which are projected at that frame rate. Examples are Jason and the Argonauts by Harryhausen and Pes.

2). Magic Lantern

The early magic lanterns were made of wood, this was a fire hazard as the light source used was a small fire inside the lantern. The magic lantern was the first form of projection; it was projected on walls using slides put in front of the lens. Sometimes more than one slide was put in front of the lens to give the impression of transformation (man into werewolf).

1). Cave drawings

Cave drawings were the first evidence of people, along with this they are also the first images done by people. They were used as a marker by cave men to say, “I was here” (like modern graffiti where people write there names on walls). Silhouette images of hands, done by cave men, were also used similar methods used today. Cave men would spray the paint from their mouths to get the shape of the hand, kind of like spay paints and templates used today.