Ray Harryhausen And Charles Schneer example essay topic

Ray Harryhausen is the greatest artist in stop-motion animation. With a career that spans 40 years of cinema, he became a by-word for innovation, excitement and entertainment in the world of special effects and film fantasy. Born 1920 in Los Angel as, Harryhausen from an early age was fascinated with stop-motion animation due to seeing King Kong at the agee of thirteen. Ray Harryhausen was given an to per sue a dream and learn from the greatest of animators, Willis O'Brien. American Film magazine, (June 1981 p 49) "I had a magnificent two year period while working on Mighty Joe Young with Obie", "covering the long per production and photography. He was so involved in production problems that I ended up animating about eighty-five percent og the picture".

After gazing vital experience with Willis o'Brien and having completed studies at the University of Southern California in painting, drama, sculpting, anatomy and photography. Ray Harryhausen produced a series of short films called Mother Goose Fairy Tales. Coming to the final phase of the series, Ray Harryhausen was approached by a young producer, Charles Schneer, and formed a productive partnership which lasted over thrifty years. Ray Harryhausen and Charles Schneer went to work and produced a whole series during the science fiction boom of the 1950's. Titles included It Came from Beneath the Sea, Earth versus the Flying Saucers and in 1957, Twenty Million Miles to Earth. It was also in this period that Ray Harryhausen pioneered his new form of stop-motion animation - Dynam ation - which then became a key feature consistent through out all of his work.

Breaking away from the 1950's had Ray Harryhausen and Charles Schneer leaving science fiction behind and venture into the world of fantasy, fairy tale amd mythology... in the decide of 1950 to 1960, they both produced the highly acclaimed Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. This was also they " re first opportunity to use colour film. In 1963, Ray Harryhausen produced his most famous and successful film Jason and the Argonants. Quoted by Adrian Wootton interviewing Ray Harryhausen, (1) "Jason and the Argonants is also regarded by Ray Harryhausen himself, as his most complete film, incorporating as it does much of his seamless and yet outstanding stop-motion animation in many memorable sequences".

Ray Harryhausen finally brought the curtain down on his film career in 1982 with his and Charles Schneer greek mythological epic, Clash of the Titans. In 1991, at the sixty-fourth Academy awards, Ray Harryhausen received be latent recognition for his abilities and received the Gordon E. Sawyer Award for Technical Achievement. Since his retirement from active film-making in 1982, Ray Harryhausen has been rightly recognised for his achievements in stop-motion animation. This period has seen a recovery of his work as technically innovative, highly artist and very distinctive in an aesthetic visual style. Due to his dedication and ground-breaking talents Ray Harryhausen is seen as the godfather of the 1950's B-movies, and an icon to the next generation of film makers - Joe Dante director of Gremlins (1984), Inner space (1987), James Cameron producer of The Terminator / T 2 and Titanic (1984) and Dennis Muren visual effects supervisor of Jurassic Park (1997), Terminator 2 (1997) and Star Wars (1977-1999). Q outed from an ar tical by Paul Mandell Harryhausen Animates Annual Sci-Tech Awards, (2) "His success could best by measured by those whose careers were directly inspired by him.

Said stop-motion master Jim Danforth, "Ray Harryhausen is more than a great animator. He's a storyteller."Ray's films affected an entire generation of people", Dennis Muren, ASC affirmed. "George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were directly inspired by his images. We all owe a lot to Ray.

His importance and success in his difficult field kept me and the other going when we were younger. He was a great role model for all of us. More than a technician, he's an exceptional artist". Although the films in which Ray Harryhausen participated in, were seen largely as low-budget B-movies. In more recent years Ray's achievement in the arts and his distinctive aesthetic claims to his status of an auteur, are due to his particular approaches he innovated while creating his animations. His stylized approach can be seen in varied works like Eric Fogel's Celebrity Death Match seizes (1998) and Henry Selick's Nightmare Before Christmas (1993).

Ray's studies gave him the skills need to achieve his as Paul Mandel said, (2) " cinematic quality", known as 'Dynamtion' first introduced while work on The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and than later in his first 'Dynamaton' feature The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958). The first step in was to film the background image. The camera would be set on a real street and actors could be filmed running towards the camera. The camera is locked so it does not change position at all while filming the background. The background film is then developed and loaded into a projector back at the studio. The projector then projects the first frame onto a back projection screen.

The back projection screen is a thin piece of plastic stretched tightly across a frame. Unlike a regular screen, the image appears on the front when illuminated by a projector from behind. A motion picture camera is loaded with film and locked into position in front of the screen so it can rephotograph the film clip as it is projected onto the screen. This camera will be used to capture the new action.

A piece of glass is then put between the camera and the screen. The glass is painted with black paint so that portions of the image on the screen that are to be in front of the armature model (the foreground) are blacked out when seen by the camera. In between the glass and the screen a table is set up on which the model (s) are placed. The table might also hold anything that the model might directly interact with during the scene. The model is carefully positioned so that it is matched for size and position with the image on the screen as seen through the camera. The film in the projector is advanced one frame at a time.

With each frame the model is moved to simulate the nes scary action. After the position of the model is adjusted, the camera captures one frame. The frame at this point shows the background image of the upper half of the screen, the model in front of it, and the blacked out portions of the glass. After the entire scene has been filmed both the projector and the camera are rewound back to the beginning. The glass is removed and another sheet of glass is inserted. The new glass is the reverse of the first one, though, as the portions of the glass that were clear now have been painted over and the sections that were blacked out are now clear.

The model and the table are cleared away. The film is re-shot again, this time exposing the foreground part of the image which had before been blacked out. When the film from the camera is developed and viewed it will show the model interacting with the. It is through this technique that Ray Harryhausen uniqueness emerges.

As Paul Wells quoted James Cameron, (3) "Ray was the ultimate vertically-inter gated creative entity. He would conceive of the characters; often, he would work work out the story to allow these characters to come into being. Then he would draw them; he would sculpt them, and then he would bring them to life through the craft of stop-motion. When you are a stop-motion animator, you are talking the place of an entire film crew; you are single-handed ly creating a movie. In a way, you are the most unsung hero in Hollywood; but in another way you are the most pure auteur in hollywood.".