Willis O'Brien (Developer)

Willis O'Brien was born in California in 1886 .He was a special effects artist who pioneered the technique of stop motion animation. O'Brien is best known for his work on movies such as King Kong (1933) and The Lost World (1925) for which he won Academy Awards for in the visual effects category.




O'Brien was dedicated to the idea of building models just as animators draw cartoons and make them into motion animation. His technique was combining realistic stop-motion animated models with live action models, as shown in many of his films such as King Kong. He created movement by using armature when making his characters out of clay and slightly moving their limbs and taking a picture. This technique today is known as Claymation and has been adapted by many animators today such as Aardmann for Chicken Run  and Tim Burton for Nightmare Before Christmas.



Early in his career, O'Brien would create his characters out of clay but eventually he hired people to create more detailed and complex models based on his designs. These complex models included rubber skin built over the metal armatures and a special 'bladder' which could be inflated and deflated that created the illusion of the character breathing. He died before the film he was working on, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World was released but was given the ASIFA-Hollywood award to recognise his career and contribution to cinema.