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Ray Harryhausen, Whose Creatures Battled Jason and Sinbad, Dies at 92
Ray Harryhausen, the animator and special-effects wizard who found ways to breathe cinematic life into the gargantuan, the mythical and the extinct, died on Tuesday in London. He was 92 and lived in London.
His family announced his death.
Often working alone or with a small crew, Mr. Harryhausen created and photographed many of the most memorable fantasy-adventure sequences in movie history: the atomically awakened dinosaur that lays waste to Coney Island in “The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms”; the sword fight between Greek heroes and skeleton warriors in “Jason and the Argonauts”; the swooping pterodactyl that carries off Raquel Welch in “One Million Years B.C.”
Though his on-screen credit was often simply “technical effects” or “special visual effects,” Mr. Harryhausen usually played a principal creative role in the films featuring his work. He frequently proposed the initial concept, scouted the locations and shaped the story, script, art direction and design around his ideas for fresh ways to amaze an audience.
Mr. Harryhausen made use of many different photographic effects and often combined several in the same film. But he was best known for stop-motion animation, a painstaking process using three-dimensional miniature models that are photographed one frame at a time, with tiny, progressive adjustments made by hand to the models between frames to produce the illusion of movement.
The effects he achieved inspired the generation of filmmakers who produced the digital-effects-laden blockbuster films of the 1980s and beyond.
George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Peter Jackson all cite his films as crucial antecedents for their work, and modern animators often slip homages to him into their films, like the Harryhausen piano in Tim Burton’s “Corpse Bride” and Harryhausen’s restaurant in the Pixar feature “Monsters, Inc.”
Unlike later animators like Mr. Burton and Nick Park, who used stop-motion in highly stylized ways, Mr. Harryhausen strove for realism. He constantly sought ways for his creations to share the screen and interact with live actors and settings as seamlessly and believably as possible.
The heart of his technique was a process he developed called Dynamation. It involved photographing a miniature — of a dinosaur, say — against a rear-projection screen through a partly masked pane of glass. The masked portion would then be re-exposed to insert foreground elements from the live footage. The effect was to make the creature appear to move in the midst of live action. It could now be seen walking behind a live tree, or be viewed in the middle distance over the shoulder of a live actor — effects difficult to achieve before.
His innovations were honored in 1992 with a career Academy Award for technical achievement. At the Oscar ceremony, Tom Hanks told the audience that he thought the greatest movie of all time was not “Citizen Kane” or “Casablanca” but “Jason and the Argonauts.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/08/movies…uGu/Q&_r=0
Source: http://yeoldefalseflag.com/thread-ray-harryhausen-whose-creatures-battled-jason-and-sinbad-dies-at-92
