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 Angelas, Harryhausen from an early age was facinated with stop-motion animation due to seeing King Komg at the agee of thirteen. Ray Harryhausen was given an opertunity to persue a dream and learn from the greatest of animators, Willis O’Brien. American Film magazine, (June 1981 p 49) “I had a magnicficent two year period while working on Mighty Joe Young with Obie”, “covering the long perproduction and photography. He was so involved in production problems that I ended up animating about eighty-five percent og the picture”.
After ganing 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 patnership which lasted over thrity 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 – Dynamation – which then became a key feature consistant 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 decaide 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 belatent recognition for his abilities and received the Gordon E.
In the film industry, there are directors who merely take someone else’s vision and express it in their own way on film, then there are those who take their own visions and use any means necessary to express their visions on film. The latter of these two types of directors are called auteurs. Not only do auteurs write the scripts from elements that they know and love in life, but they direct, produce, and sometimes act in their films as well. Three prime examples of these auteurs are: Kevin Smith, Spike Lee and Alfred Hitchcock.
1959 was an exciting year in the history of filmmaking. An extraordinary conjunction of talent throughout the globe existed. In France, Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette, and Resnais all directed their first films, thus establishing the French New Wave. In Italy, Fellini created the elegant La Dolce Vita, and Antonioni gave us L’avventura. Most importantly, though, in America, famed British director Alfred Hitchcock gave us the classic thriller North by Northwest, the father of the modern action film.
In this paper, I want to argue that Fritz Lang's effective use of Cinemascope and Mise-en-scène in Moonfleet, ultimately allowed him to better express his signature stylistic elements, despite the many restrictions he had to work with throughout the production process. These restrictions included but were not limited to: a new stylistic filming process; Cinemascope, and the frayed relationship Fritz Lang was speculated to share with MGM, the production company he worked with for Moonfleet.
Australian animators had adopted their animation techniques from America. Stop motion animation was first used by American J. Stuart Blackton in 1898. It was used to make a short animated film called The Humpty Dumpty Circus. At its
The 1920’s in the film industry today can be seen as a decade filled with many landmarks in technology as well as overall progression in all aspects of on-screen storytelling. Director Erich von Stroheim serves as somewhat of a symbol of 1920’s film as he directed so many important and notable films during the era. Stroheim’s Greed is the one film always referenced when mentioning Stroheim’s catalog due to the magnitude of the film when considering costs and enigmatic legend that comes along with its release. The full-length seven-hour version of the film has never been seen as the version released was just a tad over two hours in running length, meaning there are five hours of unseen cinematic history stowed away with hopes from many to
All directors of major motion pictures have specific styles or signatures that they add in their work. Alfred Hitchcock, one of the greatest directors of all time, has a particularly unique style in the way he creates his films. Film analyzers classify his distinctive style as the “Alfred Hitchcock signature”. Hitchcock’s signatures vary from his cameo appearances to his portrayal of a specific character. Two perfect examples of how Hitchcock implements his infamous “signatures” are in the movies, A Shadow of a Doubt and Vertigo. In these movies, numerous examples show how Hitchcock exclusively develops his imagination in his films.
From a young age, like so many other famous filmmakers, Rodriquez grew up in the movie theater. His mother would take him and his siblings to see films such as Rebecca (1940) and Spellbound (1945) for a “weekly dose of double and triple features of classic films” (Rodriguez 4). Seeing powerful imagery such as the Salvador Dali dream sequence left an indelible mark on Rodriquez, who became a kid that dreamed in motion (Rodriguez 4). In the fifth grade, Rodriquez often drew cartoons in the margins of his school textbooks to create his own animated movies (Rodriquez 4). He painstakingly created elaborate action scenes and seemingly invincible characters that would later proliferate his own oeuvre. However, despite his visual and storytelling talents, Rodriquez was a poor kid with no aptitude for math, science, and
Two genres which have always been Hollywood staples are science-fiction and the western. The genres can be seen in films made as early as Le Voyage Dans la lune (Georges Melies 1902) and The Great Train Robbery (Edwin S. Porter 1903). On the surface the two genres are very different, however if one looks closely at them they are similar in many ways. Both genres usually feature uncharted frontiers, strong silent protagonists, frightening savages (played by either space aliens or Native Americans) and damsels in distress. The formula for these two genres was established many decades ago and in recent years it takes a film that defies and subverts those expectations such as Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood 1992) or Alien (Ridley Scott 1979) to receive an enthusiastic critical and box office response. Two other films which subvert the traditional genres of westerns or science fiction films are McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman 1971) and Blade Runner (Ridley Scott 1982). These films use archetypal settings, characters and action in a way which is substantially different from our expectations and the results are extremely memorable films.
The Wizard of Oz spawned countless sequels, both in live format as is Wicked and film sequels such as Oz the Great and Powerful. These films have never matched the emotional impact and substitute computer generated graphics for the real thing. Highly esteemed film critic Leonard Maltin said “No movie ever can, or will, replace 1939’s The Wizard of Oz…(Oz the Great and Powerful) just won’t have the same resonance.” The legacy left with The Wizard of Oz is considered to be one of the greatest influential movies of all
Besides the great components that has formed, what I unlike many of the critics believe to be one of the greatness movie of all time, an aspect of the film that does not seem to disappoint is the special effects, more specifically, the CGI’s. BBC News states that “it is this hyper-real movie magic that has made the Oscar-winner one of the most sought after visual effects supervisors in Hollywood.” Oscar winning Scott Farrar was the visual effects supervisor in the entire preceding Transformers trilogy. The movie offered “a tour de force of special effects, even if the critics were less kind about the movie's storyline”. While some may say that the visual effects used in the film were too much and sometimes unnecessary, there is no doubt that Farrar achieved great lengths and challenged future innovators of the visual and special effects industry.
Hayao Miyazaki has been revolutionary in Japanese animation. A mangaka (an artist/writer/creator of manga, Japanese comics), an animator, and storyteller, Miyazaki has not only been very successful in his work, well known and loved by many, but has changed the world of anime with his unique style of drawing. Through passion and hard work, Miyazaki has become one of the most successful animators in all of Japan.
Early in his career he created one of horror film, Nosferatu (1922); his last film was Tabu (1931), a documentary film in the South Seas. He was one of the pioneers in the technical side of the film industry, experimenting special effects in Nosferatu and Faust and the use of the moving camera in The Last Laugh. But at the same time he was a master storyteller, a director who could describe simple stories with a vast range of emotion and meaning.
In Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas a pivotal change in way animation is performed and viewed takes place. The film epitmozes the use of stop motion animation and created the standard of all stop motion from then and into the future. Nightmare Before Christmas is regarded as an iconic movie and is the basis of the stop motion, gothic animation, and the entire stylistic choices that are associated with Tim Burton.
Steven Spielberg is arguably the best director of all time! His unique movies have made him very successful in the list of all time directors. His expressive imagination makes him so unique from other directors. Blockbusters such as Jurassic Park or Saving Private Ryan helped him rise to the top.
Through time a set of procedures and principles were used to help teach the new methods to other animators. These principles are still used in animation today.