Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan

-Ray Harryhausen.

-Ray Harryhausen.

-Ray Harryhausen.

-Ray Harryhausen.

Ray Harryhausen monsters, you know, they're all beautiful.

DRAGON ROARS WOMAN SCREAMS

CREATURE SNARLS

DINOSAUR ROARS

CREATURE ROARS

I love Ray Harryhausen films,

those were a huge influence on me

as a kid.

I never knew who Ray Harryhausen was,

I just saw these things happening.

It was only later that I discovered

it was one guy giving life to these things.

That is very difficult, to define myself in two words.

I would say I was a filmmaker

rather than just an animator or a special effects person.

I'm in on the story at the beginning.

Sometimes I initiate the story.

I wear many different hats in the production.

I even, at the end of the day, go out and help sell the picture.

Ray is the only technician really who is an auteur.

It is a very unique position.

There really isn't anyone else like it.

He has a huge body of work.

There was nobody else who was doing that sort of work.

I mean, he's the only person.

He himself is deeply influenced by the master Willis O'Brien,

who had done King Kong.

Ray When I first saw King Kong in 1933,

I wanted to do something in the film business.

Well, in 1933, when I was 13,

King Kong, nothing like it had been put on the screen.

'Truly the thrill of thrills.

'Don't miss it this time.'

And it haunted me for years, even though it was a little jerky.

This creature is amazing, you know, it's so big, you know?

It just left an enormous impression.

It wasn't only the technical expertise,

it was the whole production of the film.

They took you by the hand from the mundane world of the Depression

and brought you into the most outrageous fantasy

that has ever been put on the screen.

It really set me off on my career.

I didn't know how the film was made when I first saw it.

Finally, it came out in magazines how King Kong was stop motion.

And that intrigued me,

so I started experimenting on my own as a hobby, in my garage.

I took courses in photography at USC at night school

and I studied various things, art direction and film editing.

It gradually developed from a hobby into a profession.

I couldn't find anybody to make the figures

so I had to learn to make them myself.

I couldn't find anybody to photograph it so I learned photography

and learned to do things myself.

Stop motion animation is really basically

the same principle as the animated cartoon,

only instead of using flat drawings, you use a dimensional model.

This has a rubber coating on the outside of a metal armature

and as the shutter is closed on one frame of film

you move it slightly, you move the arms

and you have to keep it all in synchronisation.

And then when you get hundreds of these still pictures,

it gives the illusion that the thing is moving on its own.

In my early days, I did mostly experiments with dinosaurs.

We were both 18 and we both loved King Kong

and I met his dinosaurs in his garage.

I said, "Oh, God, this is incredible!

"You build these, do you?"

He said, "Yes. Let me show you a piece of film I did."

And he showed me a little tiny piece of 5mm film

with his dinosaurs roaming over a prehistoric landscape.

I said, "You know something I got to tell you?"

He said, "What?" I said, "I think you're going to be my friend for life."

I wanted to make a film called Evolution.

It was about the development of life on Earth.

And then Fantasia came along and so I abandoned it.

They could do it so much better with Disney.

But I had all these tests that I had made for dinosaurs for Evolution

and I showed them to George Pal.

George Pal was a European animator

who went to America

to make a series of films there

and was commissioned by Paramount

to make the Puppetoons series.

My first professional job

was with the George Pal Puppetoons before the war.

The George Pal technique,

all the models were cut-out ahead of time in wood.

So there wasn't much creativity,

you simply substituted a new figure.

There was very little for an animator to put his own personality into.

But it was an enormous part of Ray's early career.

When he came out of the army in around about 1946,

he found a thousand foot of Kodak 16mm footage.

It was out of date, so they were throwing it out.

So he used that for his first films

and those were the Mother Goose stories

that became the first of the fairy tales.

The fairy tales were really what I call my teething rings.

That's where he really learnt so much about film making.

And he went on to make Little Red Riding Hood,

Hansel and Gretel Rapunzel, King Midas,

and eventually, The Tortoise And The Hare.

His mother and father helped him.

His mother made a lot of the clothes for the fairy tales

and his father obviously did a lot of the machining,

the armatures and everything, based on Ray's designs.

Fred and Martha, his parents, were a huge part of his life.

Most parents would have said, "No, no, you've gotta be a doctor or a plumber."

I was very fortunate, I should say,

that my father knew a lot about engineering and machine work

and he used to make a lot of my armatures on the lathe at home.

And Fred continued to make the armatures

until just after First Men In The Moon, when he died.

So all the armatures seen in all the feature films were made by Fred.

My first introduction to the work of Ray Harryhausen

was the Mother Goose stories, actually,

which at the time I was not aware that they were Ray Harryhausen's work.

FRANTIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC

I was about nine or ten years old

and, you know, it was all cosy, Christmas Eve,

and this films came on, which was Hansel and Gretel.

And I could not believe it, I was just so drawn into it, the magic of it.

I don't know back then if I knew how stop frame animation was done,

but I could see there were no strings.

I think Ray Harryhausen is really the grandfather of stop frame animation.

I mean, I know that there was Willis O'Brien as the great-grandfather.

I'd kept in touch with Willis O'Brien.

I had met him when I was still in high school.

I called him up at MGM

and he kindly invited me over.

I brought some of my dinosaurs in my suitcase and showed them to him.

And finally, after Merian Cooper and Willis O'Brien

were going to make Mighty Joe Young,

I became Willis O'Brien's assistant.

WHISTLE BLOWS

SIRENS BLARE

GORILLA ROARS

Here we were making another gorilla picture,

which wasn't quite like King Kong

but it had a gorilla.

And gorillas are my best friends.

'See Mighty Joe Young, enraged by Hollywood pranksters,

'destroy filmland's swankiest nightclub on the fabulous Sunset Strip.'

Willis O'Brien was busy getting the next setups ready

and making tests and everything,

so I ended up doing about 90 percent of the animation.

I think that's some of his best stuff

cos the personality in Joe Young is amazing.

And the way he moves, he does move like a gorilla.

Whereas King Kong doesn't move like a gorilla at all.

'See the most fantastic relationship between beast and beauty,

'a mere girl mastering a primitive giant.'

I thought I'd get in the mood

by eating celery and carrots for my tea breaks

so that I felt like a gorilla. HE LAUGHS

The studio sent a cameraman to the Chicago Zoo to photograph a gorilla.

All the gorilla did seem to do was walk across the screen and pick his nose,

so we couldn't use that to any great degree as a copy,

but it gave an idea of how a gorilla moves.

'Mighty Joe Young, whose sensational exploits will startle you.'

Ray After Mighty Joe Young, I did The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms.

DRAMATIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PLAYS

ROARING

EXPLOSIONS

SCREAMING

BEAST ROARS

I didn't want to duplicate the Lost World concept

of having a real known dinosaur

so we devised this dinosaur

between the writers and the producers and myself

and called it the Rhedosaurus,

a different type of animal that has never been seen before.

'The beast would come back,

'back to the caverns of the deepest Atlantic

'where it was spawned.

'An armoured giant...'

Ray Harryhausen and I showed up at the same time.

He said, "Well, maybe some day you'll write a screenplay for me

"and I'll do dinosaurs for you."

I said, "I'm going to pray to God for that."

His budget for that was 5,000

to put all special effects together, build the models, miniatures, everything.

Ray When we were making Mighty Joe Young

we had 27 people on the stage.

The budget went up so high.

So I tried to reduce the whole process

to a simple way of combining the live action

with the animated model.

He'd shoot the live action first

then he would project it

on a rear projection screen back there.

Screen's here, projector's back there,

project one frame at a time.

In front of that, he would put a camera.

Then he'd put his animation table and then he would take a puppet.

He'd then matte out the animation stage the puppet was sitting on with paint.

So it was live action,

still frame, puppet, still, black below.

Advance the projector, pose the puppet,

take a frame of film, et cetera, et cetera.

So what he'd do is he'd undo the animation stage, lower it out of the screen,

he would then put a counter matte which was painted

to block out the area that had previously been exposed.

And so then he would put the projector on frame one,

take a frame on the camera,

put the projector on frame two,

take a frame on the camera, et cetera, et cetera.

Now he had all of the live action

and the animation together in one go.

Ray You could intricately interweave the animated model with live actors.

It looked like they were photographed at the same time.

I tried to do a lot of research.

When I did The Beast I studied lizards.

So you have an influence of these creatures

that are similar to what may have happened in the past.

The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms being the first monster rampage movie

after King Kong, really,

and from The Beast, of course, the Japanese made Godzilla.

Who was a man in a suit stomping around on miniature sets.

Gojira is a direct result of Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, exactly.

Toho said, "We'll make one of those!"

Ray's creatures, the way they move

essentially is the way we think of dinosaurs,

how they move. I mean, even to this day.

I mean, when you see a movie like Jurassic Park...

DINOSAUR GROWLS

MAN SCREAMS

BONES CRUNCH

It was, it was like Ray did that kind of stuff all the time,

which is cool, you want to see people being eaten alive.

You know, that's what it's about.

That's moviemaking!

And Steven Spielberg, when Ray was in town,

got him over to the editorial suite for Jurassic Park.

He showed me some of his beginning of the CGI process

of the dinosaur knocking the car off the bridge.

Ray was blown away by it. He thought it was just really an amazing process.

I couldn't say anything negative because it was most impressive!

I just want to acknowledge the fact that we wouldn't be here today

making these movies, like Jurassic Park and like Avatar

without Ray. The father of all we do today

in the business of science fiction, fantasy and adventure.

I'd see a Ray Harryhausen film,

and for the next five weeks, I was drawing comic books,

my own comic books of that story.

But not just a clone of the story but my own version of it.

So I was doing this for a long time.

So Avatar really represented an opportunity for me

to do all those things I had always dreamed about.

I think Ray would have loved to have had access to the tools that we have now

for computer-generated animated characters

because, you know, for him, the stop motion puppetry

was a way for him to get the images that were in his head up on film.

And that was the only way to do it at that time.

We had to compromise on scenes that you'd want to do differently

because of the technical limitations.

But we didn't know there would be anything different at the time.

So just as O'Brien, when he started The Lost World and King Kong,

they used the facilities that they had at that time

and you didn't anticipate

the new types of electronics

that can do the most amazing things.

If Ray were working right now, he'd be using the tools that we're using right now.

He wouldn't cling to the puppetry.

His imagination would require

that he used the best, most fantastic techniques available.

Well, I don't know, it's hard to say.

It's just another way of making films.

I think I would prefer to make films

with the model animation rather than CGI, today even.

DRAMATIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC

Charles H Schneer was a young producer working at Columbia

and he saw The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms

and wanted to meet Ray.

Charles said, "Well, I want to make a movie about a giant octopus

"that attacks San Francisco."

SCREAMING

They did this film together

and they had terrible problems with the San Francisco bridge.

We were obliged to submit the script of It Came From Beneath The Sea

to the city fathers for approval

so we could get the cooperation of the police.

When they read the script, they turned it down

because they said it would make the public lose confidence

that a creature can pull down the Golden Gate Bridge.

So we had to do things through devious means.

We put a camera in the back of a bakery truck

and went back and forth on the bridge to get projection plates secretly.

I mean, it's a fantasy film

and I'm sure that no-one lost confidence in the Golden Gate Bridge

because a giant octopus pulled it down.

SCREAMING

The octopus in It Came From Beneath The Sea only had six legs.

That was because of the budget restrictions, Ray had to save money,

and therefore he dropped two legs,

literally dropped two legs, so it's only got six.

So you never see all of the tentacles out at one time because he hid them.

Ray loves calling it the Sixtopus.

DRAMATIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC

When we did Pirates Of The Caribbean here at ILM,

Hal Hickel and all the guys that

worked on that were big Harryhausen fans.

And, for example, the Kraken had six legs

because the octopus had a limited number of legs, of course,

in It Came From Beneath The Sea.

And a lot of the feeling of Davy,

that sort of, you know, in-your-face performance

came right from seeing Ray's film

where it's an in-your-face performance going on.

When Harryhausen animated the octopus for

It Came From Beneath The Sea,

I can imagine it must have been pretty difficult for him

to get the character into tentacles. There's no face.

We had a huge advantage when we created the tentacles for Dr Octopus

because we created faces, basically.

So we would have a certain opening of the mechanical aspects of it

that would create anger.

We would have another one that would be curiosity,

another one that would be sadness.

And each tentacle had a range of emotion.

I think it's pretty obvious that Sam Raimi is a huge fan of Ray Harryhausen

if you take a look at the work on Spider-Man 2

Dr Octopus. I mean, come on.

Ray Harryhausen, to me, the

most important thing that he has done

is to be an influence and to inspire

literally a generation

or probably two generations of filmmakers.

I don't know anyone else that has taken

all these young adolescent children who watched his movies

and turned them into filmmakers, directors, writers, special effects men.

I wanted the movie to be an homage to the Ray Harryhausen movies.

I'm very flattered that they find that our films were that attractive

and tried to make a similar type of image.

SIRENS BLARE

'The whole world is under attack.

'Can it survive?'

SCREAMING

I found it a challenge

to try and make the metallic objects like the flying saucer

have an intelligence inside,

even though we never showed the actual people inside.

And that came out about the time

when there was a lot of flying saucer clippings in the newspaper.

How can you bring a personality into a flying saucer?

And there were a lot of movies made with saucers in the '50s

that were pretty dull to look at.

But Ray gave them personality and life

and you were just enthralled as a kid looking at them.

These are two of the flying saucers.

They were designed by Ray,

very carefully designed by Ray in great detail.

And they were machined and built by Ray's father,

with Ray, Fred Harryhausen.

Ray built into the design three nodules on each flying saucer

so that he could actually suspend the actual machine.

And from each of the nodules would come up to the aerial brace.

SCREECHING

He'd used wire braces.

If you think of a string puppet,

you have a cross like that from which the strings hang

so you can manipulate the puppet.

He invented a geared aerial brace

where it would tilt the flying saucer.

So they'd be able to go in at a certain angle.

I knocked over the Washington Monument long before Tim Burton did.

His films, when I saw them, he just...

You felt the hand of an artist with him.

And it's something that's always touched me and I've always remembered.

No matter what technology you use,

you know, whether it's stop motion or cell

or live action or CGI,

you know, it doesn't really matter what the technique is,

you try to find artists.

They come in many forms.

The Animal World was a film that was being made by Irwin Allen,

an ex-agent who had become a producer.

And he wanted to put a film together

about the animal world, the animal kingdom.

He used 16mm film a lot and blew it up to 35

from different cameramen who had made pictures

in jungles and remote areas.

But it was going to have an opening sequence of dinosaurs.

So Irwin Allen asked Willis O'Brien to design the special effects

and Willis O'Brien asked Ray to do the animation.

He would do the setups, ie, he would design everything.

It's only a very short sequence, I think it's between 10 and 15 minutes long.

I remember when the first publicity came out,

the reviewers mentioned the dinosaur sequence before any other sequence

and said that that was the highlight of the picture.

So Willis O'Brien and I were most grateful for that.

'20 Million Miles To Earth. '

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WOMAN SCREAMS

ROARING

ROARING

CREATURE ROARS

The creature in 20 Million Miles To Earth went through many changes.

It was very stout. It had horns at one point. It had one eye at one point.

Originally 20 Million Miles To Earth was made,

as written by Ray and a dear friend of his, Charlotte Knight,

as The Cyclops, and was going to be attacking Chicago.

That was an early concept of the Ymir.

Tony But Ray wanted to go to Italy, specifically Rome.

So I changed it around because I wanted a trip to Europe.

And that's where he changed the creature from a Cyclops into the Ymir.

Finally I arrived at the humanoid torso,

sort of a lizard combination with a humanoid torso,

because I felt you could get much more emotion out of a humanoid type of figure

rather than an animal type of figure.

The Ymir, coming at the end of Ray's black and white period,

is probably the best black and white monster that he ever created,

particularly in the early stages when it's small

and it's doing things like this.

All the humanoid gestures that make these monsters so personable

and make them so much more appealing.

The design of the creature that we have in Piranha is a little bit like the Ymir.

In Piranha, there was no stop motion monster written into the script.

The stop motion monster was in the movie

simply because Jon Davison, the producer, and I liked stop motion.

Any kind of stop motion from my movies

is a tribute to Ray Harryhausen Or Willis O'Brien.

You can't make a creature film without thinking of Ray Harryhausen

because he created creatures that were so sympathetic.

And let's face it, he made the greatest monster movies of all time.

DRAMATIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC

His monsters have a heart.

His monsters are charming.

So you might be frightened by them,

but when the movie's done, that's what you remember and you care about it.

Ray never calls any of his creations monsters.

They're never called monsters, they're always called creatures.

DRAMATIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC

I destroyed New York with the beast,

I destroyed San Francisco with the octopus,

I destroyed Rome with the Ymir

and I destroyed Washington with the flying saucers.

And that got rather tedious.

So I was looking for a new avenue in which to use stop motion animation.

And I latched upon Sinbad

DYNAMIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC

CREATURE ROARS

'The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad is the eighth wonder of the screen!'

The first sketch I made was the skeleton on the spiral staircase.

And then I made six or seven other drawings.

I did a 20-page outline of how the story could develop.

And I took it around Hollywood and nobody was interested.

Howard Hughes had just made The Son of Sinbad.

It flopped at the box office.

So most of the producers that I showed it to, my drawings,

they said, "Oh, costume pictures are dead."

No, it cannot be so.

I brought the drawings out and Charles Schneer got very excited.

But I had visions in mind of doing it lavishly

like The Thief Of Bagdad that Alexander Korda made.

So I re-evaluated it

and redesigned it

so that we could make it for an inexpensive sum.

When he hooked up with Charles Schneer, who was a sympathetic producer,

he gained a lot of power

and therefore he was able to go to the story conferences

and able to design the movie through the storyboards

and really have an extreme effect

at putting his mark on the pictures.

We got several writers to formulate a script,

a comprehensive script, using my drawings as the basis

and that's how The 7th Voyage developed.

I remember growing up with Maria Montez films.

She and Sabu and John Hall

made a series of Arabian Nights pictures for Universal.

One was called Ali Baba And The 40 Thieves.

And they would talk about the Roc, they would talk about the Cyclops,

but you never saw it on the screen.

CYCLOPS ROARS

The critics started saying that it was animated, the creatures were animated.

The average person hears the word animation,

they immediately think of a cartoon.

So we found that many people, particularly adults, stayed away

because they thought it was for children.

So we tried to devise a new name called Dynamation from "dynamic animation."

'This is Dynamation!'

DRAMATIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC

I designed the Cyclops very carefully

because I didn't want people to think it was a man in a suit.

So I put goat legs on, like a satyr in ancient mythology.

And I gave him an appearance and three fingers

so that no-one could assume that there was a man inside the Cyclops.

And I think it worked out very well.

Whereas I was beginning to learn

how to alter a human face and a human head,

Harryhausen could do anything.

He could make a huge Wingspan on a creature.

He could make something have a single eye and make it blink. Backward bent legs.

He could make dragons, he could make octopus.

I couldn't do that. I could change the shape of someone's nose.

I could turn myself into Mr Hyde.

I could turn my friends into the Mummy.

But I couldn't do these fantastic creations.

And so, yeah, I guess I was a little bit jealous

because it seemed way out of my league.

I get more fan mail coming in about the Cyclops I think than any other character.

My favourite Harryhausen creature is always going to be

the Cyclops in 7th Voyage

because that was the one that, you know...

Suddenly it's in colour and it comes out on the beach

and it's huge and it's got this strange sort of motion to it you can't figure out

and it's angry

and it's going to get poor Sinbad.

And, you know, you never forget that.

It was so inspiring that it made you want to make movies.

Are we going anywhere special tonight?

I just got us into a little place called, erm, Harryhausen.

HE LAUGHS

You know, Ray, my first success, if you like, in movies

was when I was 15 years old

and I made a film for a high school competition called The Valley

and it actually won the award for best special effects

and this was the star of that movie.

You'll see a similarity

to somebody that you created a long time ago.

When I was 12, 13 years old,

and other kids were getting interested in cars and sports and girls,

I used to like monsters, and I particularly loved Ray's films.

I think Peter Jackson said he

had a bunch of stop motion things that he had done.

He wanted to be Ray Harryhausen. He tried doing this stuff and was like,

"No, maybe I'll be a director instead!"

Without The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad

you would never have The Lord of the Rings.

Peter had developed his way of directing scenes

and I had developed my way of directing and designing scenes

and when we did Lord of the Rings,

we collaborated on designing and directing sequences

which emulated what we felt was the best of Harryhausen.

Ray Harryhausen, he's a child himself, to some degree.

He's able to connect with the audience and say,

"Isn't this amazing, isn't this cool?

"Creatures, monsters, let's bring them to life."

On Alice in Wonderland Tim Burton obviously is a big fan of Ray's

and the last sequence with the Jabberwocky,

we wanted to touch a little bit on Ray's work.

So the Jabberwocky does certain stances and things.

He doesn't fly. He does more Harryhausen-y type of movement.

JABBERWOCKY Roars

And the location it takes place in is kind of like taking Rob Stromberg's designs,

a bit of Jason And The Argonauts

squeezed into the spiral staircase to nowhere from 7th Voyage.

If you had James Bond fighting a skeleton,

it'd be comical.

But having a legendary character like Sinbad, who personifies adventure,

you would accept it more readily as a melodramatic story.

We had Enzo Musumeci, who was an Italian fencing expert.

And when we would rehearse, he would play the skeleton in The 7th Voyage.

He'd give claps of his hands to get a beat.

They knew that at that point, they had to stop their sword and not let it go through.

When the first 7th Voyage Of Sinbad was released in England,

they cut out the whole skeleton sequence.

They said it would frighten children.

Good Lord, what you see on the screen today

is more horrifying than any skeleton on the screen!

MAJESTIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC

The 3 Worlds Of Gulliver was a classic story

and that really brought us over to Europe,

because The 3 Worlds Of Gulliver

required big people and little people, little Lilliputians.

We used to have to wait maybe six weeks

to get a composite print of what we called travelling matte

where two pieces of film are interwoven with one another in the optical printer.

And the Rank laboratory had a travelling matte system

that would make the picture very practical.

So we decided to move our whole operation to Europe

and use the sodium backing that the Rank laboratory had in England.

Music I found very important.

I discovered that when I first saw King Kong.

The fact that the score for King Kong enhanced the film so much,

I became interested in music

and what it could do to heighten the emotion of the visual.

Ray has a passion for film music.

He actually animates to music sometimes to give him inspiration.

A very famous one is the snake woman from 7th Voyage Of Sinbad.

He used to play Scheherazade to that

and that gave him inspiration before Bernard Herrmann came on board.

Bernie Herrmann, I used to listen to his music on Orson Welles' radio show.

It was Charles Schneer that managed

to get Bernard Herrmann on board

and he went on to write exceptional scores for 7th Voyage Of Sinbad

Gulliver, Mysterious Island and Jason And The Argonauts.

And his music is very unique and was just made for our type of film.

DYNAMIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC

The scores that Bernard Herrmann wrote for Ray Harryhausen

are certainly some of the most exciting, I think, that he wrote.

-Where's Gulliver?

-Here I am!

Down here.

DRAMATIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC

Glumdalclitch! Down here!

Bernard Herrmann

was very strange and very quirky

but he also had the adventure sense.

Grand, but quirky and strange.

The Harryhausen movies, for sure, that's where

Herrmann was at his best,

as an orchestrator doing incredibly unique things,

being extraordinarily colourful,

and two, being highly dramatic in the best of ways.

He contributes greatly to the believability of it all

because he takes it so seriously.

Every composer I've ever known who's worked in fantasy or horror films or sci-fi

have talked about how he's influenced them.

Ray got on with Bernard Herrmann very well,

as you can tell from most of his animation sequences.

We wanted to make fantasy memorable

and I think that's occurred.

WOMAN SCREAMS

Fantasy, I would say, appealed to my sort of gothic mind,

from my German ancestors, I suppose.

Fantasy is magnificent on film.

There's no other medium

that you can express yourself in fantasy the way you can in films.

DRAMATIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC

'Whatever you have imagined in your wildest dreams

'now becomes a visual reality,

'as Jules Verne's most fantastic adventure in space and time...'

Mysterious Island was another problem.

The studio, Columbia Pictures, had a script

and after we'd made The 7th Voyage,

they felt that perhaps we would be interested in doing Mysterious Island

which was a Jules Verne story.

We used the basic principles of The Mysterious Island

but we had to make it more interesting

because it ended up as just how to survive on a desert island.

We restoried the whole basic line

to add to the final screenplay that you saw on the screen.

At first, it started out as a prehistoric background.

We were going to have dinosaurs. Then we decided against that.

And finally, when Captain Nemo became prominent in the story,

we decided to have it based on

him trying to produce more food for the world by growing everything large.

We would have many so-called sweatbox sessions

where the writer would turn in a certain number of pages

and we would tear it apart and analyse it.

Then I would bring drawings of what I thought we could do

lavishly on the screen for little money.

Then it was the writer's job to incorporate all these suggestions

and drawings into the final screenplay.

I have a two-year-old daughter who loves Mysterious Island

a movie she calls "Big Chicken Fall Down".

WOMAN SCREAMS

'Jules Verne,

'a man whose great stories inspired such unusual films as

'Around The World In 80 Days, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea,

'Journey To The Centre Of The Earth,

'surpasses them all with Mysterious Island.'

SCREAMING

The crab came from Harrods department store.

It was a live crab when I bought it at the fish market

and we had a lady at the museum put it down in a humane way.

She took all the meat out of the inside

and I put an armature in the actual crab.

The next step was to try to put Greek mythology on the screen.

MAJESTIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC

Some of the films are better made than others.

And some of them have better scripts than others.

I mean, Jason And The Argonauts probably has the most literate screenplay

and so it's a better movie.

A lot of people find Jason And The Argonauts

is one of our best films.

It's my favourite because it was the most complete.

The plots of Harryhausen movies are fairly consistent

and I think that's one of the reasons that Jason And The Argonauts sticks out

because there's a lot of other Greek baggage that goes with that story.

Basically, the Talos sequence came from an idea I had

about the Colossus of Rhodes.

DRAMATIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC

In the original tale of Jason And The Argonauts,

Talos is just an eight-foot mechanical creature.

If you look at Talos,

how does a man of bronze move, you know?

And it's just so miraculous how that moves

and how he creates this sense of size,

how enormous, enormous.

I mean, what other monster is as big as Talos? I mean, just enormous!

Without changing any expression.

I mean, Talos is a statue.

When he's dying,

grabbing for his throat, the way he moves is something!

I want to speak on behalf of all the actors

that appeared in Harryhausen films.

They weren't all monsters, they weren't all effects,

there were real live actors in there.

What I do remember

was the hands-on ability he had to direct us.

I ran along the sand

and what astonished me was that Ray ran with me.

And he said, "I looked up to the sky, there was the monster."

There was no monster, just a big blue emptiness.

But he said, "Fall now!" I fell...

We were trained to be classical actors,

to appear at the Old Vic. That was our standard.

But there was I eating sand in Palinuro.

But loved it, loved it!

Loved being there, being part of this titanic imagination of this man.

I love the fact that when you're watching one of his movies,

you're aware that you're looking at literally a performance of his.

I mean, he's acting through all these different creatures,

whether it's a Cyclops or a snake with nine heads.

I mean, you're seeing... you're seeing his acting abilities.

As an animator, you have to kind of become an actor.

You know, you're...

Before you do a piece of action,

you often either look at yourself in the mirror

or you act it through on video just to see what it is,

and you put something of yourself...

You know, you try to put emotion into an inanimate puppet.

He sort of starts in his brain, goes through his fingers

into the creatures that he's animating and finally onto the screen.

I asked him once, with the Hydra, with all those seven heads,

I said, "How did you keep track'?" He said, "I have no idea."

This is the seven-headed Hydra from Jason And The Argonauts.

It's probably one of the biggest of Ray's models.

As you see, it has incredible detail.

The complexity of it, seven heads, two tails.

Ray could never make anything easy for himself.

He would always make it more complex each time.

The Hydra came from the Hercules legend.

We had to bring that in.

We didn't want a dragon because there had been dragons on the screen before,

so we chose the Hydra.

This creature, like most of the creatures in Ray's films,

were built in Ray's workshop in his London house.

DRAMATIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC

There is a sequence in the original tale of Jason

where corpses come out of the ground,

rotting corpses which are not very pleasant to look at,

at least in that time.

Well, we didn't want to get an X for our film

so we made them clean-cut skeletons.

And we had seven skeletons.

Seven is a magic number all through mythology.

And we had seven skeletons fighting three men.

He always tried, like filmmakers do today, to outdo themselves.

And that's why one skeleton developed from 7th Voyage

into seven skeletons in Jason And The Argonauts.

Why have one when you can have seven?

This is one of the original skeletons from Jason.

He has every joint that a real skeleton would have.

We photographed the live action first

with stuntmen who portrayed the skeletons who were swordsmen.

We'd time it very carefully

and maybe rehearse it ten times

and then the final piece of film,

the stuntmen are removed

and the actors shadowbox.

And that as a piece of film I rear-project behind these skeletons

so that the human being is the same size as the skeleton.

FRANTIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC

When the skeleton kills Andrew Faulds against the temple

and Andrew Faulds falls on the ground

and the skeleton looks around

and he then jumps over the body

that's an aerial brace, the use of an aerial brace.

Aerial wire animation takes a lot longer and it's very complicated.

Most people would have had it stepping over or going around

but Ray had him jumping over.

That's the difference. That's the Harryhausen touch.

Sometimes I would only get about 13 to 15 frames a day.

It took four months to animate to the sequence.

It only took two weeks to photograph the live action.

They pretty much used every single frame that they shot, too,

so it was... He was very economical.

Almost everything was take one.

98%, 99% was take one.

An amazing achievement if you think about it.

We never had money or budget or time to do retakes.

I think if he finessed it and did two takes, three takes,

it wouldn't come from his heart.

He would refine it too much in his mind

and it would not be what he initially thought.

And HR Giger taught me that. The more quickly you get your ideas out of your head

and up on the screen or onto the canvas, the more real it's going to be.

I believe Clive Barker told me the same thing.

He said, "When I'm painting, I like to make mistakes."

And I think that has a lot to do with why Harryhausen's stuff really resonates

and sticks and stays in all of our minds, because it's very pure.

FRANTIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC

When I was about 12 years old, I remember rushing home.

I couldn't wait to see

Jason And The Argonauts for the first time.

And I was just so gobsmacked.

The skeleton fight in Jason And The Argonauts,

I can practically remember what row I was sitting in

at this little theatre in Orangeville, Ontario, at the age of nine

when the images of those skeletons leaped off the screen

and drilled straight into my DNA.

I know this isn't real but, boy, it sure looks real.

And that's the feeling I had as a young boy in the theatre watching Ray's films.

When you're transported as a young person to these fantastic worlds,

whether it was Greece or wherever it was,

and skeletons move around and swordfights happen, this is magic!

FRANTIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC

I'm sure there's a direct link between those demonic skeletons

and the chrome death figure in The Terminator

So, Ray, I hope you can forgive me

and remember that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

I see a lot of sequences that we had originally done years ago

reproduced in various films of today.

Very flattering!

'The first Men In The Moon.

'An experience unparalleled on the screen

'as two worlds meet and clash.'

HG Wells,

I was a great admirer, and I wanted...

After Mighty Joe Young I wanted to do War of the Worlds

and I made a lot of drawings and an outline for the story structure.

I wrote to Orson Welles but I never got an answer.

I wanted to do The Time Machine

but somebody else had already taken the rights.

Finally we did a Wells story called First Men In The Moon.

DRAMATIC STRING MUSIC

We tried to keep that feeling that the insects developed an intelligence

rather than the mammals.

I think Ray Harryhausen would probably say

that he was influenced by Georges Melies.

If you look at his work, it really is part of a continuum

that goes back to the birth of cinema.

SLOW PIANO MUSIC

Actually, Ray has a personal business card

of Georges Melies.

Ray, oh, yes, a huge admiration for Melies,

and I think most fantasy filmmakers do.

The First Men in The Moon aliens are...

Nowadays we would look at them as kind of

this B-grade, you know, cliche, kind of like...

But a cliche I actually really love.

I love the fact that when we design aliens

for feature films or comics or games or whatever,

humans keep on going back to the same grab bag of elements.

They're insectoid or they're reptilian

or they're, like, octopi or cephalopods and stuff.

We just go back to the same cliches again and again.

Everything humans think is creepy,

crawly and disgusting, that's what aliens become.

Stand back!

Essentially the best effects films, like District 9

are the ones where you can feel the hand of the creator

within the design and execution of the creatures.

What's important to remember is when you look at the link between Ray Harryhausen

and the work of, say, ILM or Phil Tippett

is how much there actually is in common between them.

And really, in essence,

how little has changed in spite of how the technology's evolved.

CREATURE GROWLS

I'm always saying to the guys

that I work with now on computer graphics,

you know, "Do it like Ray Harryhausen,"

or, "Why don't you just look at a Harryhausen shot and see what he did?"

And I'm always going back to that well

because of the economy and the simplicity.

Take guard!

There's this tendency with computer graphics, because you can do it,

if you want somebody to reach and pull something in

there tends to be, like, these ridiculous flourishes and all this extra stuff.

It's like, "What's that about?" "Just do it," you know?

"Just get to it and tell the story as directly as possible."

One of the ironies is all the great innovators

in computer-generated animation

are all stop motion animators.

I mean, you know, Phil Tippett, Dennis Muren,

these guys, they were all animators.

The first job I got was actually doing stop motion for a commercial

and I think that really sort of helped to figure out the character,

what its performance is, what it's feeling,

and communicating that idea in a few frames to the public.

The role of the animator is changing.

First of all, you've got motion capture,

you've got all these tools available to you,

so the actors are giving us amazing reference.

-How will I know if he chooses me?

-He will try to kill you.

The CG character would be from their performance,

exactly as they did it, down to the minutest detail.

And so the animators, who are very important in the process,

they would do the tail, the ears,

and they would ensure that the actor's performance

was exactly replicated in the CG.

Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art.

And I would argue that's the way that every master

of every medium of animation,

be it puppet animation, clay animation,

computer animation, hand-drawn animation,

that exact thing happens with them.

Well, there's room for every type of media for entertainment.

After all, that's the end product, is to entertain the public.

If you can entertain them with a yoyo,

well, that's fine, use a yoyo for entertainment.

But that's rather difficult.

'One Million Years BC.

'Introducing the fabulous Raquel Welch as Loana The Fair One,

'John Richardson as Tumak'

One Million BC is another matter.

I made that for Hammer films.

And they bought the rights to a remake of it,

a 1940 film with Victor Mature and Carole Landis.

I don't like retakes, basically,

but I felt we could do better than the original

where they used lizards with fins glued on their back

and they had a tyrannosaurus with a man in a rubber suit

that looked so phony, they had to keep hiding it behind bushes.

So all you saw was an eye or a finger or something.

So I wanted to change that concept by using animation.

DINOSAUR ROARS

A lot of the motion is developed on the screen

and comes from the character.

If you have a dinosaur, I like to keep it active

by having the tail swooshing all the time.

I used to read dinosaur books

and imagine going to see them. What it would be like to stand next to them

and then I discovered this film where there are real people with dinosaurs

and I couldn't believe it.

ROARING

My influence was Charles R Knight,

the key figure in the American Museum of Natural History.

He was the first one to restore dinosaurs from the basic skeletons.

Here is an example of some prehistoric restorations

and then we start actually from the skeleton, the basic skeleton,

to plan the armature for the rubber models.

And then we go to the museums and actually see the skeletons

and try to develop our animals

in a way that they're well known from the museum point of view.

DINOSAUR ROARS

Ray Harryhausen's work had a huge influence on us

during the design of King Kong.

There were lots of ways we could possibly go

with the design of the creatures and the dinosaurs.

And Peter said he didn't want them to be real dinosaurs,

he wanted them to be movie dinosaurs.

So we were trying to evoke that era of dinosaurs from movie history

and really capture that.

And in that sense, they're more sort of monsters and characters

more than they're true animals.

DINOSAURS ROAR

I remember one scene when we were in Lanzarote,

this is when these pterodactyls were kind of coming over us

and we didn't know this, we didn't see this,

but Ray got onto a flatbed truck

and drove in front of us

while we, in our little wet, skimpy little pieces of leather,

brandished our spears...

at these things.

SHE GROWLS

Raquel Welch was cast in the picture.

That was one of her first films.

She never looked like a real cavewoman. She wasn't supposed to.

That wouldn't have been very entertaining to the public.

If cave women in prehistoric days looked like Raquel Welch,

we've regressed today!

Gwangi was another story.

Willis O'Brien started Gwangi at RKO

way back in the '40s.

And unfortunately, the war came along and they cancelled the picture

after OB spent about a year preparing it.

So he kindly gave me a script years ago

and I had it in my garage

and Charles and I were looking for a subject one time

and I brought out this whole script of Gwangi.

O'Brien's original idea was to have cowboys

roping a dinosaur for the Sideshow.

That always impressed me. And we tried to keep that part of it in the picture.

The lasso sequence in that, of course, was incredibly complex.

The lassos from both sides of the...

the cowboys lassoing the monster around the neck or on the foot,

would be lassoing this pole on this Jeep which would be hurtling around.

He put the screen together at the back

so he obliterated the Jeep with the monster stick.

The miniature ropes would be tied to the monster around the neck

and that would go off at exactly, match the exact same direction

as the live action would on the rear projection plate.

It took well over two and a half months to film that one sequence.

DINOSAUR ROARS MEN SCREAM

CHAOTIC SHOUTING

Ray, we owe you more than we can ever really express,

based on all of the roads that you pioneered and built from dirt

into a superhighway of eventual digital technology.

The V-rexes in King Kong were...

They're fundamentally different

from what we know real dinosaurs to be.

They had this heavyset tail that was hanging down, they had three fingers

and they're basically inspired by things like Gwangi from Ray Harryhausen.

Harryhausen has never worked with a, quote, "Great director."

No-one ever says, you know,

it's a Jim O'Connolly movie or it's a Nathan Juran movie.

It's always a Ray Harryhausen movie.

It was his concepts, the creatures in them were from his mind,

so they were his films.

A lot of directors couldn't see that.

There were examples where the director

did not approve of Ray being on location shoots,

but didn't quite understand why he was there.

Even though the scripts would detail in Ray's drawings

exactly what was going to happen in that sequence.

I make hundreds of continuity drawings

which show the progression of the scene

and then I direct those scenes myself.

½Ray Harryhausen was the star of those movies.

I couldn't really tell you who the actors were in the films

but I certainly remember the creatures.

I mean, the thing with the films,

I think there's some terrible acting in it,

the scripts aren't the greatest,

but, boy, his elements, when he made clay live

are still some of the best moments in film.

I was probably about six or seven at the time

and I remember two old ladies came up

and said, "Oh, hello, sweetheart.

"Can we have a look in your baby buggy'?"

"Yeah, you can look at my dollies," you know?

Pulled back and there was Gwangi!

Of course, instead of dolls, I had dinosaurs.

To me, it was normal. Dad had them all over the house.

And he didn't have an oven

and so he used our oven to cook his creatures in.

And lunch times and dinner times used to be very interesting

because everything tasted of latex rubber.

And after a while of having roast chicken tasting like rubber, it was not so funny.

By the time we finished the picture, which took a year and a half,

they had sold the studio

and the new owners didn't have any respect

for what the previous owners sanctioned,

so they just dumped Gwangi on the market.

Unfortunately, it was released too late.

If it had come out in the '50s or early '60s,

I think it would have been better received.

The word Gwangi suggests something like Godzilla,

so everybody thinks that maybe it was made in Japan.

You'd need a very big publicity campaign

to make people aware that it was an unusual film.

It's sad because a lot of people feel it's one of our better pictures, too.

ROUSING ORCHESTRAL MUSIC

'See the sorcerer of the black arts,

'the gold helmet faceless Vizier,

'the death fight of the centaur and the griffin, the six-armed goddess of evil.'

ROARING EXPLOSION

Gwangi was not a big success at the box office

so we decided to go back to the Sinbad pictures.

So I devised two stories, Golden Voyage and Eye Of The Tiger.

When you work with Ray, you're absolutely sure what you're doing.

It comes from his drawings,

drawings that I, as a sculptor,

could reproduce his things in full size.

His work is so accurate in conception

that there's no ambiguity, so I knew what I was doing.

Ray was the king, the god

and you did what he said.

One of the toughest things about integrating a character

is really making it appear to be in the scene.

And the best way to do that is to...

...create something that physically happens, really on set.

And it had to be rigged by the special effects department.

DREAMY ORCHESTRAL MUSIC

Working with Ray Harryhausen

was the most amazing experience for me.

I was a relatively, well, very unknown actress

and had never worked with his stop motion Dynamation.

There was nothing to work with.

Ray used to show us these wonderful drawings that he'd done

and say, "Now, this is what you're going to be reacting to,

"but it's not a drawing, it's a real-life, huge, enormous creature,

"17, 20-foot high.

"So this is what you're going to be reacting to."

So you kind of become like a child, in a way

and remember how you used to play.

And then Ray, his eye line was a stick,

so he'd have the stick and on the stick he'd drawn this eye

which for me was the centaur's eye.

And Ray would wield the eye.

"Look at the eye! Look at the eye!" And this was Ray's eye line for the actors.

It's hard to get actors to look in the right place.

They look like they're looking further than they're supposed to.

It takes a particular kind of actor who can look at a distance

and make you think he's looking in

the middle distance as opposed to far away.

'Behind this door lies a world of wonders,

'a studio where special effects wizard Ray Harryhausen

'and producer Charles Schneer

'make the unreal real in the magic of Dynarama for countless moviegoers.

'In their new film, The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad

'Schneer and Harryhausen move from the drawing board

'to a sunny beach in Majorca.'

We were originally going to shoot The Golden Voyage in India

and Kali was a result of planning the picture for India.

But when we changed our mind and shot it in Spain, for many reasons,

we left the Kali sequence in.

We felt it would be a very good dramatic situation.

SITAR MUSIC

My work seemed to bridge O'Brien's period

into the modern Star Wars effects.

I think my favourite creature from a Ray Harryhausen film

would probably be from the first one I ever saw,

which was The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad

And it was the Kali, the giant statue that comes to life.

And it was just so shocking to see it so beautifully rendered and animated

and I think it stands the test of time. It hasn't really aged one bit.

And I still find it terrifying.

Many critics called our films a special effects film, which they were not.

We used every effect at the time

in order to put the fantasy subject on the screen.

'Journey across the oceans of antiquity

'to the northern edge of the ancient world.'

'Filmed in the miracle of Dynarama.

'Come face-to-face with the prehistoric troll.

'See the sorceress bring life to the all-powerful minotaur.

There's something that happens with stop motion that I've always felt,

when you use an actual model rather than computer generated images.

The model is strange,

it gives the nightmare quality of a fantasy.

It wasn't really very realistic

but it was great because he was creating fantasies.

I don't, as a filmmaker,

and at Pixar, we don't ever want to

make things that are absolutely

perfectly real.

We like to, like Ray, take a step back from reality.

If you make fantasy too real,

I think it loses the quality of a nightmare, of a dream.

With stop motion, you can never quite get it to look real

and that's actually an asset,

because you get a sense of the work that's gone into it

and it makes the performance much more dynamic, possible.

There's really no constraints except the artist doing it.

It's not the same as with a CG thing,

because CG, our brain seems to know

that's not quite the same

as an actual piece of physical

material that's been given life.

This is like the Golem.

I mean, our whole world. It's like God creating Adam.

You take clay and your give it life and then it breathes and Ray did that!

And it's the result of that particular kind of animation, I think.

There's something cold about computer graphics.

I don't think it was always this way.

Maybe I'm looking back fondly at some of the early stuff that was done

that seemed to me more realistic.

I think we could touch the dinosaur in Jurassic.

As an industry, we're turning out so many shots so quickly

that we haven't had time to catch up and learn how to do it.

And when we were doing the first stuff at ILM, back in the early '90s,

you know, we spent months or even a couple of years

figuring out how to make this thing look like an object and not like a graphic.

That was the big challenge at that point.

I would find it rather unappealing

to sit at a desk and just push buttons to get a visual image on the screen.

I think they're really two different things.

Stop motion is what it is, an art form and a sense of tactile feel

and the artist is visible in every frame.

CG is something else that's more of a fluidity

and it's just different.

Stop motion is still alive, it's not dead.

People say, "Oh, it's a lost art", but it's not a lost art.

I mean, Henry Selick and Nick Park,

there's a lot of people doing stop motion still.

All the guys at Aardman doing clay animation.

I mean, come on!

Do you really want to see Wallace & Gromit

in any other medium? No!

The storytelling that they do,

the subjects that they choose,

lend itself to the stop motion medium.

You know, when you're sat there with a character, it's in front of you,

you use your fingers,

you're holding it, you're handling it,

there's a kind of... There is a kind of connection.

Unlike all the other types of animation,

what you see is a real performance.

It starts at frame one

and the animator has to make that journey.

In other forms of animation, you'll do these key poses

and then a computer or an assistant will in-between.

And you can manipulate those and change.

To lock yourself away in a studio

and be able to move something

with hundreds of joints...

If you lose the thread, the thing just becomes nonsense.

Shots can sometimes take up to 15 or 20 hours.

If there's a mistake, if there's one mistake,

if the camera goes crazy or your puppet breaks, you're doomed

and you have to start the process all over again.

Occasionally, if the phone rings,

I answer it and that's maybe where you'll see a little bit of a jerk

because I'd forgotten whether one head was going forward

or one head was going backward.

Now, with digital and videotape,

the stop motion animators have a way of keeping track.

Ray did it all in his head!

MONKEY CHATTERS

You animate the model and one pose leads to another pose.

It is like sculpting, you have to know what you're doing and then just do it

because if you try to think about it your brain would implode.

It's not an intellectual thing, it's an intuitive thing.

And I think that, for me, is really important to have that contact

and you're manipulating it frame by frame

so you're kind of struggling with it.

Like in any kind of a live performance

you always leave an allowance

for some other adjustment that you may want to do.

You may be thinking that you're going to do this

but you'll get into it and all of a sudden you'll realise,

"You know what? I could do this instead."

And so you can improvise.

Ray You may know the broad concept of what's happening in the scene

but all the little details are put in as you go along

by your imagination.

CREATURE ROARS

There was a man who said, "Why do you go to the trouble of using stop motion?

"Why don't you put a man in a suit?"

Well, that's the easy way out.

In the 15 features I've made and the many shorts,

I did all the animation myself.

And I was able to do that up until the '80s.

I was a loner. I preferred to work by myself

because animation requires an enormous amount of concentration.

In the days of Ray Harryhausen, it was Ray

and a guy that used to click the shutter on the camera.

And he'd do the thing and the guy would click.

And it was two guys doing it.

Now it's an army.

Today, of course, it takes 80 people, 90 people.

You see them credited on the screen.

One person does the eye, one person does the nose,

one person does the tail of the donkey.

One person's doing the facial, another person's doing the body.

Sometimes another person can be

doing even tail motion or ear motion.

People doing the layout, people doing the muscle rigs,

people doing the facial rigs, people doing the lighting.

You know, there's a whole team that's a shader team.

There are people doing things I don't even know what they do!

It's a different atmosphere.

Some shots that are done today with computer graphics

were the entire budget for their movies.

And so the economy of a singular guy working on this thing,

it was very important that he was able to have creative control over the stuff.

Now it's such a big organisation

with many, many producers and many effects technicians working on it.

It's difficult to give a singular vision.

There really aren't very many singular vision films actually made any more,

unless you're a Spielberg or a Cameron or a Peter Jackson,

a director strong enough to be able to put that vision all the way through.

And even then, it kind of needs to be watered down

cos there are so many people working on it.

One person must arbitrate between many, many good ideas.

You know, should it be lit like this or should it be lit like that?

And they're all valid choices.

Should the creature be green or should it be brown?

Any choice you make is going to be valid

when you're working with such talented people.

But one person does have to arbitrate and sometimes it's a very arbitrary choice.

That is defined by specific individuals, by an author,

and in most cases, that's the director.

But with Ray Harryhausen, it was the visual effects artist.

I'm grateful that I was able to do what I did

without having any interference from the studio or from anyone.

I remember somebody made a film some years ago about Medusa

and they had just an actress with a wig on with snakes.

Every time she walked, they would bobble up and down, you know?

It wouldn't frighten a two-year-old child.

So I always wanted to animate Medusa

and I had a great chance when Clash Of The Titans came about.

I tried to design her so that she wouldn't have clothes.

That's why I gave her a reptilian body,

because I didn't want to animate flowing cloth.

We gave her the arrow from Diana's bow and arrow

and the rattlesnake's tail,

so she could be a menace from the sound-effect point of view.

It became a big problem because she had 12 snakes in her hair

and each snake had to be moved, the head and the tail,

every frame of film,

along with her body and her face and her eyes and the snake body.

The Medusa sequence,

if you see that film,

the tension that builds up

between...

the actor and his shield

and everything that goes on there,

and you realise the bulk of it is just stop motion,

close-ups of stop-motion. It's a wonderful piece of work.

I wanted green eyes for Medusa, but I couldn't get them

so I had to use blue eyes, unfortunately.

They were dolls' eyes, little baby dolls' eyes that were put in her skull

and you would roll them around with the stop motion process.

I would move them with an eraser of a pencil.

People think if you design monsters,

you design them for the sake of making them cool,

but you never do that.

You design them to be the character that you want them to be.

A good monster has to have character,

has to have a personality,

you know, it has to be crazy, savage, funny.

Whatever you want to use,

you have to define it by the silhouette, the details, you know?

And if the monster works like that then it's a well-designed monster.

The monster that attacked Andromeda in Greek mythology,

there are various concepts of a dragon-like creature.

I wanted to make it semi-human so it would make the story a little more logical.

I gave it sort of the arms of an octopus with hands on the end of it.

And he developed from that point of view.

The Kraken was a word that is not in Greek mythology.

That comes from Norse mythology more.

We needed a word and I guess the writer felt that was the right word to use.

I do think it's very important to sketch creatures

before you sculpt them,

for the very simple reason, again, it comes to the purity.

Your mind can move your hand on a paper in two dimensions

much more quickly than it can move your fingers in three dimensions.

And if you sculpt something, it takes longer.

If you sketch something you can do it more quickly and get your concept out.

All my illustrations are in black and white.

I never cared much for colour.

It took too long for one thing, for me.

And I was never groomed in colour, to speak of.

I learned mostly by doing it myself.

Ray obviously did very simple