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The death of stop-motion animation pioneer Ray Harryhausen raises questions about the future of special effects, writes Ethan Gilsdorf. In the good old days, it did not take so much to trick the eye.

"There comes a point where people will reject digital effects and want movies where we actually did something in real space, and real time."

That's a quote from a film director perhaps the least likely to decry computer-generated special effects: Peter Jackson. Interviewed for the 2011 documentary Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan, Jackson said, essentially, that as digital special effects in movies become increasingly advanced, we'll crave the real even more. Real, as in "real" fake -- physical puppets of gorillas and T-Rexes, Medusas and animated statues, not ones made from pixels. Real, as in physical models manipulated by hand and filmed one frame at a time, not rendered in some fancy computer program.

But Jackson's comment about a movie being something that happens "in real space, and real time" feels surprising, if not ironic. The director most known for creating miniature models and sets (and so-called giant miniatures, or "bigatures") for The Lord of the Rings, and seamlessly mixing them with digital trolls and elves, later turned away from the "real" miniatures he used in that trilogy. In his last film, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Jackson finally and fully embraced digital effects. It's a film in which nary a miniature or puppet exists.

Now, the death on May 7 of stop-motion animation pioneer Ray Harryhausen poignantly brings these issues of real and fake, analog and digital, info focus. Harryhausen's passing represents the end of an era. It closes a crucial chapter in special effects history. It's also a kind of turning point in film technology. From here on out, it's too late to return to the analog.

If you don't know who Harryhausen was, you've probably seen his work. The master animator is best known for breathing life into giant, writhing serpents, sword-wielding skeletons, and marauding dinosaurs in such fantasy adventure and monster movies as The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), Mysterious Island (1961), Jason and the Argonauts (1963), and Clash of the Titans (1981). Harryhausen was an innovator, and in many ways the father of the modern special effects craft and industry.

Harryhausen's trademark action sequences featuring animated model figurines -- always pictured interacting with, or more often, fighting with human foes, or crushing them, or biting them in half or flying away with them -- might seem clunky and old-fashioned when measured by today's standards. But in their day, the effects Harryhausen pioneered were cutting-edge. He painstakingly filmed his "creatures" frame by frame. The process was exhausting: The 4 minute, 37-second skeleton and human fight sequence from Jason and the Argonauts reportedly took four and a half months to photograph and Harryhausen had to readjust and film around 184,800 movements of the puppets.

Then, using his patented "Dynamation" technique, those skeletons and serpents could interact on screen with actors in a remarkable realistic way. The Dynamation process combined foreground and background footage by photographing miniatures in front of a rear-projection screen. Sometimes, he shot sequences through a partially-masked glass pane. Live footage would later be superimposed on the masked portion of the frame, and voila, the creature or creatures seemed to exist in the midst of "real" human-scaled action, or even appear to move in front of and behind "live" elements. Harryausen also carefully controlled lighting and color balance to make sure the image quality of his animated sequences matched the quality of the live action. His effects were more convincing than the standard use of optical printing and mattes. This was before green screen, folks.

The magic was unlike what anyone had ever seen before.

The fantasies his stop-motion artistry enabled inspired not only Peter Jackson, but George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, Guillermo del Toro and countless other filmmakers. Even if the success of their films -- particularly the trailblazing CGI dinosaurs Spielberg employed in Jurassic Park (1993) -- ended stop-motion animation forever. That said, Jurassic Park incorporated its fair share of animatronic dinosaur heads and giant talons, which may explain why that movie still stands up so well today.

(Harryhausen may have even inspired Dungeons & Dragons. A great article at toplessrobot.com makes the convincing case that the creators of D&D were influenced by Harryhausen's animated skeletons, giant rocs and hydras.)

Harryhausen's passing represents the end of an era. It closes a crucial chapter in special effects history. It's also a kind of turning point in film technology. From here on out, it's too late to return to the analog.

This summer, in films such as World War Z, After Earth and Star Trek Into Darkness, viewers will be again assaulted with all manner of space battles, snarling creatures, armies of zombies, dazzling cityscapes, armadas of spaceships and strange lands stretching to some mythical horizon -- all created with a digital pen in a digital special effects program. If Harryhausen were alive and working in the industry today, he might be making giant robot movies like Guillermo Del Toro's Pacific Rim coming later this summer, or movies involving swarms of goblins and orcs like Peter Jackson's.

But he's not. Times have changed. And not necessarily for the better. The death of Ray Harryhausen represents the end of "real" special effects, and the end of the "real" in fantasy. That is a huge loss for American cinema.

What exactly is lost when we lose the rubber puppet or the Styrofoam model? It's not a question of artistry. Digital effects take incredible talent. Rather, the substance of the matter is related to what Jackson says, this sense of "real space, and real time." To me, the issue is realism vs. gravity. How real can these pixels feel? Can they truly have heft or presence? I would argue, no -- no matter how perfect the texture, rendering, shadow, and digital lens flare (as J.J. Abrams is clearly in love with in movies such as Star Trek Into Darkness) mixed and layered into an FX sequence's cocktail of CG imagery.

Sure, the effects look good, but they're not necessarily more "real" looking than the effects Harryhausen created. As Harryhausen himself said in a 2006 interview: "There's a strange quality in stop-motion photography, like in King Kong, that adds to the fantasy. If you make things too real, sometimes you bring it down to the mundane."

Indeed, his effects seem to work especially well for creating that sense of something to be conjured, some fantastical beast awakening. How would Talos, a man made of bronze, or a winged mythical harpy look and move if it came to life? Maybe a little jerky, a little stuttered, a little shaky, the same effect stop-motion creates.

But perhaps the debate about digital vs. analog effects balances on the fulcrum of taste. And the age and era one hails from. I, like many children of the 1970s, grew up worshipping Harryhausen. I was raised on Saturday afternoon monster movie shows such as Creature Double Feature. Those slightly awkwardly animated beasts were real. To my eye, no matter how lifelike it may become, CG still has an eerie, weightless, plastic quality. The better these special effects get, the weirder they look.

Star Wars was the first harbinger of change in FX, and the first true effects movie that was a popular hit, ushering in the era of the genre blockbuster. But even that 1977 film was made, largely, with stop-motion animation -- albeit computer-controlled stop-motion animation. Those were real plastic models of X-Wings and TIE Fighters dogfighting through the Death Star's tunnels. That 3-D chess match between R2-D2 and Chewbacca was made to look holographic, but it was filmed using Harryhausenesque rubber puppets. The ships, like the Millennium Falcon, had heft, and the light and shadow cast upon them looked right, because they were real. As longtime Industrial Light and Magic technician Paul Huston has said, all those "mechanical systems, plumbing, landing gear, laser blasters, vents, injectors, ducts, fuel tanks" were made of plastic. Some were "scratch-built and some were scavenged from plastic model kits."

The palpability of the real. I lament and mourn the scale model. I'd rather have a foam and plaster (or toothpick and duct tape) Rivendell or Tatooine, instead of one built brick-by-brick from pixels. The chicken-wire and plaster ruins of the Star Wars sets in Tunisia still exist. They have a presence. They leave behind a gravity that the digital can never attain.

Above all we have become spoiled. In Harryhausen's day, it did not take much to trick the eye into believing a film protagonist was being attacked by a giant bee or one-eyed giant centaur cyclops. Today, we are more discerning. We expect greater verisimilitude. Like addicts, we want more spectacular eye candy. And Hollywood, the eager dealer, delivers.

For the moment, we can tell the difference between computer-generated imagery and real live action photography. But as ILM's Huston himself admitted, the end is nigh. "As research continues and solutions and awareness develop," he said, "CG will become indistinguishable from actual photography." Movies such as Avatar, Transformers and Inception and keep pushing the boundaries, making the day that comes true arrive sooner.

But Ray Harryhausen's work endures. It contains gravity. Somewhere, there is a 10-inch-high seven-headed hydra, or ape, or octopus, or Kraken, or one of the seven skeletons from Jason and the Argonauts. And, to my mind, in my mind's eye, that monster feels as if it could still tremble, and walk, and come alive.

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Why Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion effects were more real than CGI

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The death of stop-motion animation pioneer Ray Harryhausen raises questions about the future of special effects, writes Ethan Gilsdorf. In the good old days, it did not take so much to trick the eye. "There comes a point where people will reject digital effects and want movies where we actually did something in real space, and real time."

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Ray Harryhausen was the stop-motion animator extraordinaire behind such fantasmagorical creatures as the fighting skeletons, the cyclops, Medusa, Kraken, and the beast from 20,000 fanthoms in such classics as "Jason and the Argonauts" ( 1963 ), "The 7th Voyage of Sinbad" ( 1958 ),and "Clash of the Titans" ( 1981 ).

As part of our tribute to the late Ray Harryhausen we thought we'd include a brief introduction to the process he created known commercially as Dynamation. It can also be called the "split-screen" process because of the way the screen appears to be split while the animation is being enacted in the middle layer.
Prior to Harryhausen's development of this technique most animation was created for sequences that did not require "live" actor interaction within the scene. For instance, in an adventure film a group of archaeologists may come across a dinosaur grazing on grass in the distance. The director of the movie would film the actors expression of surprise upon seeing the dinosaur and an animator would film the stop-motion sequence of the dinosaur but when completed these scenes would remain separate...actors in one scene, animation in another. However, with the split-screen process, viewers were able to see the actors directly interacting with the animation..e.g a dinosaur with a man struggling to get free from his grasp.

In three-dimensional stop-motion animation, an object, or a poseable model, is photographed one frame at a time using a traditional film camera. In between each frame the animator moves the arms or legs of the model a fraction of an inch before photographing the object again. When these still shots are run through a projector the rapid succession of images creates the illusion of movement. A standard 35mm film projector runs the film at 24 frames per second, and so 24 separate photographed frames have to be taken to make each second of animation on screen. Hence, a 2-minute sequence of a giant cyclops eyeing a tasty morsel for dinner would take 2,880 separate frames to compose. Quite a time-consuming task!

Stop-motion animation can be traced back to the beginning of movie-making, in the late 1800s. Some of the earliest animated films include Vitagraph's "The Humpty Dumpty Circus" ( 1897 ) by Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton, featuring a circus of acrobats and animals coming to life, and "The Haunted Hotel" by J. Stuart Blackton ( 1907 ).

Willis O'Brien was the resounding king of animation during the early days of talking pictures. He brought to life the prehistoric creatures of yor in First National Pictures adaption of Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Lost World" ( 1925 ) and later, in one of the most iconic films of the century, "King Kong" ( 1933 ), where he created a creature so lifelike in appearance and emotion that many viewers were brought to tears at his demise at the end of the film.

It was Willis O'Brien's work on "King Kong" that instilled in Ray Harryhausen the desire to make stop-motion animation his career. The Eighth Wonder of the World inspired the young 14-year-old Ray to attempt creating his own model Kong, which led to his discovery of the stop-motion animation process.

Under O'Brien's tutelage, Harryhausen learned the filmmaker's craft from the ground up and by 1948 was working alongside O'Brien on his first feature film, "Mighty Joe Young" ( 1948 ). O'Brien had utilized the multi-dimensional process of interacting animation with the actors through the means of sandwiching his models between two glass paintings, one of which was painted foreground, and shooting "through" them with the camera.

It was while workingsolo on his second featurefilm ,"The Beast from 20,000 Fanthoms", that Harryhausen realized what a tiresome and time-consuming process painting foreground could be and knew that it would never work for that particular film due to the low budget the production had. He had been experimenting with using mattes as far back as 1938 to create a "split-screen" and so on "The Beast from 20,000 Fanthoms" he put those tests to use.

The split-screen was a simple process that used mattes to block out portions of the film. Since film only develops from the light that escapes through the eye of a camera, any portion that is blackened out remains undeveloped. If the film is rewound the portion that was blackened can then be used again. This technique was used as far back as the early 1900s.

Dynamation however, used a model in between the matte and the background image to create a three layered image. The first step in the Dynamation process was to plan out in detail the movements the model, or creature, was to make and then to film the live-action scene with the actors and usually a stick or stand-in crew members to represent the movements and position of the creature.

This film was developed and rear-projected on a screen. Harryhausen would place his model on an animation stand in front of this screen and then place a large pane of glass in front of that. On this glass he painted in black the foreground that he wished to block out. After filming the animated sequence so that the creature interacted with the actors as planned, he then rewound the film and filmed through the glass again, this time with the image he had previously filmed blackened out.

Although it sounds like a very tiresome process, it was actually much easier to utilize mattes then to build and film miniature sets for the models to move in. In 1957, Charles Schneer, the producer of many of Harryhausen's films during the late 50s and 1960s, dubbed this split-screen technique
Dynamation. He was sitting in his Buick one day while waiting for traffic and noticed the Dynaflow logo written on the dashboard...he thought the prefix dyna would be the perfect marketing term for Harryhausen's animation process.

Harryhausen used Dynamation in "It Came from Beneath the Sea" ( 1954 ), "Earth Versus the Flying Saucers" ( 1956 ), "The Animal World" ( 1956 ) and "20 Million Miles to Earth" ( 1957 ) but it was not until "The 7th Voyage of Sinbad" ( 1958 ) that it was exploited as a merchandising feature.

"Dynamation will be brought to the screen for the first time in C O L O R !"

In the short trailer "This is Dynamation!" ( 1957 ) used to promote "The 7th Voyage of Sinbad", the narrator announces the glorious wonders of the technique and how "anything that the mind can conceive can now be brought to the screen".

Dynamation was utilized on all of the Ray Harryhausen films up until his final feature motion picture, "Clash of the Titans" in 1981. Today, most special effects are created using computer graphic programs ( CGI ) but somehow, in spite of the amazing realism provided by digital graphics there is something very unique, very alive, about Harryhausen's technique. Perhaps the creatures we see created by computer effects have lost their awe because we know the secret behind their existence The mysterious process of Dynamation was kept from the public during the release of many of his biggest films... and this was one more element that added to the magic of the Harryhausen pictures.

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Ray Harryhausen and the Creation of Dynamation

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Ray Harryhausen was the stop-motion animator extraordinaire behind such fantasmagorical creatures as the fighting skeletons, the cyclops, Medusa, Kraken, and the beast from 20,000 fanthoms in such classics as "Jason and the Argonauts" ( 1963 ), "The 7th Voyage of Sinbad" ( 1958 ),and "Clash of the Titans" ( 1981 ).

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The UnMuseum - Ray Harryhausen's Dynamation

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The technique used a split screen, with rear projection. Split screen had been around as a special effect from almost the beginning of film itself. One early clip from France shows a bicycle rider sailing over the city of Paris.

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Images and Info

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Zoetrope Replica Optical Toy Ancient Magic Toys

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Images and Info

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The phenakistoscope (also spelled phenakistiscope or phenakitiscope) was an early animation device that used the persistence of vision principle to create an illusion of motion Although the principle behind the phenakistoscope had been recognized by the Greek mathematician Euclid and later in experiments by Newton, it was not until 1829 that this idea became firmly established by Belgian Joseph Plateau.

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Starting point for Worksheet 5

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Film Before Film - Phenakistoscope, Zootrope, Praxinoscope