Ray Harryhausen

A Few Legacies

Ray Harryhausen was born on the 29th of June 1920 in California, America and is best known as a visual effects creator, producer and writer. He invented his own brand of stop-motion animation called 'Dynamation'. He was the inspiration for multiple modern animators that are famous today.

Working with George Pal

Harryhausen obtained his first job working on George Pal's puppetoons shorts. Through that he worked for the Special Services division under Col Frank Capra as a loader, clapper boy, goffer and later on as a camera assistant during WW2. Whilst doing this he also worked on his own short films at home animating short films about the deployment and uses of military equipment.

First Try, First Hit

His first solo feature film was officially called 'The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms' released in 1953 for Warner Brothers pictures and became a huge box office hit. Within this film he used a new animation technique that split up the foreground and the background of live action footage into two separate images. He would then integrate his animated models into the sequence and re-photograph it, resulting in smooth stop-motion and live action animation. His family helped him a lot with his animation work; his father would often assist in making the metal armatures and his mother would design outfits and coverings with various different materials depending on what was needed.

Working with Colour Film

Harryhausen started playing with colour film at the time of making a documentary called 'The Animal World'. He experimented a lot with various colour stocks to overcome the colour-balance and light-shift problems he encountered. He was asked to help by Willis O'Brien who was struggling to meet the short deadline set to finish the eight minute long dinosaur sequence. This was Harryhausen's first professional colour work and was the first sequence shown in the film. This was the top grossing film of the summer and again one of the top three grossing films of the year.

Columbia Pictures Partnership

He soon met and began a beneficial partnership with producer Charles Schneer, who was working with the B-Picture unit of Columbia Pictures. Their first science fiction feature film was 'It came from beneath the sea' released in 1955. It was about a giant octopus-like creature that came from the ocean and started attacking San Francisco and was a huge box office success. This was quickly followed by 'Earth vs. the Flying Saucers' that was released only a year later in 1956. A setting in Washington D.C and was about the planet Earth facing an Alien invasion. This was one of the best and top grossing invasion films of the 50's and was also a big box office hit. 

Cinema Scope work

After cranking out great artistic and technical films such as 'The Three worlds of Gulliver', 'Mysterious Island' and 'Jason and the Argonauts' at a rate of knots he then made 'First men on the moon' based on the novel by H.G Wells in 1964. This film was his only feature film made in the anamorphic widescreen process of Cinema Scope. Only a few of Harryhausen's films have been made to be set in the present day or the future, almost all of them have been set in the past at various points in time.

From Films to Books

During the early 1970's and all the way through to the 2000's Harryhausen wrote many books, novels and 'fantasy scrapbooks'. These were designed to guide and inspire young animation pioneers of the new Century  Some main titles were 'Ray Harryhausen: An Animated life', 'A Century of model animation: from Melies to Aardman' and the latest of his books that was only just published last year; 'Ray Harryhausen's fantasy scrapbook' which sold very well. He also made big production films alongside his writing passion that have inspired re-makes in the turn of the new Century, e.g. 'The Golden Voyage of Sinbad' and 'Clash of the Titans'.

Currently

At this time Ray Harryhausen is still writing books and still appears at regular science fiction conventions and runs his charity 'The Ray and Diana Harryhausen Doundation' to this day. However he is now 92 and does little in terms of filming much to his fans dismay.