Ray Harryhausen was born in California in 1920. He is best known as a visual effects creator and for creating his own stop motion model animation technique known as 'dynamation'. Harryhausen was inspired by Willis O'Brien's work in King Kong, this sparked his interest in stop motion animation.
Harryhausen combined animation with real-life action using puppets. This way, the animation would look more 'real'. He was one of the first to use model armature for his models. As not many people has used armature before it was hard to make the motion smooth. the special effects of animation along with the live action as well as animated movies. For the film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) he used a special technique where he would split up the foreground and the background of live action footage into two different images. After, he would integrate his animated models into the sequence and once again take a picture of it which resulted in smooth stop-animation and live-action animation.
Harryhausen also started playing with colour film when creating The Animal World, a documentary, He experimented with many colour sticks to overcome colour-balance and light-shift problems that he came across.
Ray Harryhausen's films were for all ages as he used humans and armature models so people could enjoy the film both ways. His work and technique inspired many such as Aardman and Tim Burton and other film makers. The only downside of using armature is the movement can be a bit restricted.
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