Ray Harryhausen RIP

[AdamSmith]

One of the greatest of the greats...

Visual Effects Pioneer Ray Harryhausen Dies at 92By Duane Byrge | The Hollywood Reporter – 17 hours ago

Visual effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen (Photo: Everett Collection)

Animation effects wizard Ray Harryhausen, who pioneered many of the stop-motion techniques that have become today's industry standards, has died at 92.

Revered for his cutting-edge effects work in the '50s and '60s on such fantasy classics as The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts, Harryhausen developed the technique of projecting footage from the front and rear, one frame at a time. He dubbed the technique “Dynamation.”

Ray Harryhausen's work in 'Jason and the Argonauts'

Utilizing his Dynamation process, Harryhausen brought to life both mythological figures and pre-historical creatures in such films as The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts where he created the famous skeleton swordfight. He created extra-terrestrials in such entertainments as Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and Twenty Millions Miles to Earth.

In 1992, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences presented Harryhausen with ah honorary Oscar, a tribute to his visual magic. He was presented with the Gordon E. Sawyer Award, an Oscar statuette, given to an individual “whose technological contributions have brought credit to the industry.”

In those early years, he performed his stop-motion techniques on very low-budgeted projects. His effects created spectacular havoc in such disaster films as The Best from 20,000 Fathoms and It Came from Beneath the Sea. He re-created dinosaurs in One Million Years B.C.

During the '70s, he created cutting-edge special effects for three films: Golden Voyage of Sinbad, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger and Clash of the Titans.

“They were considered B pictures because they were made on a budget. But we outlived many of the A pictures made at the same time,” he once noted.

More recently, he produced MGM's Clash of the Titans (1981), which starred Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith, Claire Bloom and Ursula Andress.

Harryhausen considered his specialty to be creating “fantasy creatures,” where he would insert the monsters believably in the same frame as actual actors. “I don't do monsters you know. Monsters are associated with horror. I'm not interested in horror…I don't' want to deceive or frighten. I want to create illusions, fantasies, legends,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1981.

Harryhausen inspired a cult following and was the subject of a 1986 documentary, Aliens, Dragons, Monsters and Me, directed by Richard Jones.

Other films included: Valley of the Gwangi, 20,000 Miles to Earth, First Men in the Moon, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, Mysterious Island, Animal World and The Valley - Time Forgot.

Of today's films and special-effects propelled plot lines, he was less than enthusiastic: “Now you have to sit through two hours of people dying…Today, everything's so graphic it's rather unnerving.”

Ray Harryhausen was born June 19, 1920 in Los Angeles. As a child, he saw King Kong and was dazzled by the special effects, becoming as, he said, a "King Kong addict.” He was inspired by King Kong effects guru Willis O'Brien. As a child, Harryhausen paid a visit to O'Brien's home, showing him some amateur creatures he had created. Also,while in high school, Harryhausen joined a sci-fi club and met up with two enthusiasts who would become lifelong friends: Ray Bradbury and Forrest J. Ackerman.

He was an avid photographer and attended Los Angeles City College where he studied photography and sculpture. He went on to USC, he where studied drama and art direction. After graduation from USC, he worked on George Pal's animated Puppetooons. He entered the service during World War II.

After being discharged, Harryhausen began his movie career in 1949 with Mighty Joe Young, where his boyhood hero, Willis O'Brien,” was chief technician. In 1953, he was hired by Warner Bros. to be in charge of special effects for Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, where he implemented his split-screen technique to insert dinosaurs and other awesome creatures into the story backgrounds.

He next worked on three science fiction films at Columbia, including The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, a documentary which was highlighted by his monsters interacting with the stars and buttressed by Bernard Herrmann's tempestuous score.

In 1981, Harryhausen was honored with an exhibition and retrospective over an entire month by New York's Museum of Modern Art. He was later paid tribute by the American Cinematheque.

In 2006, Harryhausen was honored with a retrospective of his works at the historic Byrd Theater in Richmond,Virginia.

He was married to Diana Livingstone Bruce.

http://movies.yahoo.com/news/visual-effects-pioneer-ray-harryhausen-dies-92-050000837.html

[AdamSmith]

Another nice tribute...

The animated life of Ray Harryhausen Horatia Harrod on the fantastical worlds of the legendary stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen, who has died at the age of 92.

Image 1 of 4

Ray Harryhausen looks at the original models from his 1963 film 'Jason And The Argonauts' Photo: Getty Images

By Horatia Harrod

11:08AM BST 08 May 2013

Ray Harryhausen and I came of age, cinematically, 60 years apart. Harryhausen had his epiphany at the age of 13, when his aunt, a nurse, was given tickets by a man she was caring for to "a movie about a gorilla". It was a day Harryhausen would never forget: at Grauman's Chinese Theatre, one of Hollywood's most extravagant movie palaces, creeping ferns decorated the cinema's forecourt, and live flamingos stalked the foyer. But more than all that, it was the night Harryhausen met King Kong, and discovered the extraordinary, painstaking art - stop-motion animation - that would dominate the rest of his life. "I find it all rather difficult to believe," he later wrote, "that in one afternoon a film about a giant gorilla had the influence to alter the direction of my entire life."

Harryhausen had watched King Kong doing battle with plesiosaurs, pteranodons and pterodactyls, brought to life by Willis O'Brien, the greatest of early stop-motion animators. One of Harryhausen's lifelong friends was the science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, who remembered the two of them making a pact: “We said, ‘We’re going to grow old but never grow up. We’re going to stay 18 years old and we’re going to love dinosaurs forever.’ ”

I grew up in a different age, but had the same craving for fantasy, for other worlds. For me, dinosaurs loomed large too, but it was Jurassic Park that was the touchstone. Steven Spielberg, that film's director, and George Lucas and James Cameron, later pioneers of special effects, were all Harryhausen's heirs. All acknowledged their debt to him. "The first time I dabbled in clay," said Spielberg, "was to try and recreate some of the amazing characters that Ray created for those breakthrough pictures."

The first of Harryhausen's films I saw was Jason and the Argonauts (1963), almost certainly on television, where his films have had a long afterlife. It was the skeletons that stayed with me, grinning evilly as they did battle with swords and shields; later, I watched The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), with

, and his Fifties films, with paranoid B-movie titles like It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955) and

(1956).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=IXmRuJByoVs

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I met Harryhausen in 2010, in the grand Holland Park house in which he lived with his wife, Diana, a descendant of the explorer Dr Livingstone. We had spoken on the phone to make the appointment, and he'd seemed gruff, forbidding. He was a strikingly powerful looking man, even at the age of 89, but when we sat and talked and drank tea, there was a delicacy to his movements, and a stillness that I attributed to his long years of animating delicate creatures by hand.

Harryhausen had been, he said, a "loner": "I preferred to work alone so I wouldn’t be talked out of doing certain things." When Harryhausen began, there weren’t any guides to stop-motion animation, so Harryhausen had to work out how to do it by himself. He got his father, a machinist, to make the metal endoskeletons and armatures for his creations, which he then covered in latex. His mother sewed the costumes. Later, he would cook his models in the oven, to the dismay of his wife.

Somewhere in the house were his legendary monsters. He had tried to hang on to as many as he could, but was powerless to stop the rubber models from disintegrating. As he said at the time, "rubber is like humans: it’s fine material, but it will rot!" I don't think it's fanciful to say that Harryhausen's creations had heart. CGI animations are, beneath the surface, lines of code; Harryhausen's creations, brought to life second-by-second by hand, have the breath of life. They weren't realistic, but inhabited some other realm, of magic, perhaps. "Fantasy is a strange thing," he told me. "If you try to make it too real, you lose the effect of fantasy. So there’s a very strange line of demarcation there."

It wasn't a surprise that Harryhausen was less than enthusiastic about modern movie-making, although he spoke fondly of Peter Jackson's Weta Workshop, and the artistry of Industrial Light and Magic. He had worked to tight budgets, planning each shot with an almost neurotic degree of precision. "Just by moving the camera to a certain level, you could save thousands of pounds," he said. "They don’t seem to care today. They spend $200 million on pictures, which is just pathetic!"

Harryhausen's final film, the original

(1981), starring Maggie Smith and Laurence Olivier alongside some of his most ambitious creations, was given a vicious review by Variety. Harryhausen was disillusioned; he quit the movies because he'd "had enough of darkened rooms." He had, he said, lost his drive. His animating spirit will live on all the same.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/10043240/The-animated-life-of-Ray-Harryhausen.html

[Guest NCBored]

I have been a science-fiction and fantasy buff since childhood, and his amazing creations provided me with countless hours of entertainment and escape - he will be missed!

[AdamSmith]

Likewise. One of my favorite possessions is an autographed photo of him adjusting one of his monster models.