Willis O'Brien

The Pioneer

Willis O'Brien was born on the 2nd of March 1886 in California, America and died on the 8th of November.   He was an Irish-American stop-motion and special effects pioneer and is most famous for his science fiction films; 'The Lost World', 'King Kong' and 'Mighty Joe Young' for which he won the Academy award for Best Visual effects in 1950.

Bringing the past to life

He started out as a professional marble sculptor and was an assistant to the head architect of the 1913 San Francisco World's Fair. He made models, mainly featuring dinosaurs and cavemen, and with the assistance of the local news camera crew he animated the figures and made a small stop-motion piece. Attracting the attention of the Edison Company he was funded to create his first film 'The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy' in 1915 with a budget of $5,000. He was then asked to animate a series of Prehistoric themed short films for the company, these were the first stop-motion films to combine live actors with stop motion models. The films grossed over $100,000 and the Director Dawley took the majority of the credit and then went on to use the effects for sequel 'Along the Moonbeam Trail' and his documentary 'Evolution'. O'Brien received little in financial compensation from his successful film.

Out on his own

O'Brien then left the company after that fiasco and went out on his own and took his models with him. In 1933 he worked with skilled animators to create much more detailed models based on O'Brien's production designs with rubber skins stretched over complex miniature metal armatures. These models contained a bladder inside of the rubber skins that could be inflated and deflated to give the illusion of breathing. His previous dinosaur models he had created and his new breathing armatures were then used to create one of his most famous films; 'King Kong'.

Working with Harryhausen

Ray Harryhausen worked alongside O'Brien in his production of 'Mighty Joe Young' and some would say did the majority of the animation. In this film O'Brien was credited as the technical creator and was later awarded the Academy award for best visual effects in 1950. He then worked with Harryhausen again six years later for the famed dinosaur sequence in Irwin Allen's nature documentary 'The Animal World' in 1956.

Posthumous Award

Before death he worked on his last animation project 'It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World' featuring few of the main characters dangling form the fire escape by a ladder, however he died before the film was completed. Later in 1963 he was posthumously awarded the Windsor McCay Award by ASIFA-Hollywood (The American Association internationale du film d'animation) to recognise his contributions to the art of animation in his lifetime and career.