Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan Page #10

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.

(Steve Johnson) 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 drawings

that were perfunctory,

because they were for himself, he knew

he was gonna build from the design.

And he had that luxury of being the one

that was actually gonna realise everything

from design through to actual...

what was gonna get printed to each frame.

(Ray) My influences over the years

was largely Gustave Dore,

a French artist in the Victorian period.

He illustrated the Bible,

many thousands of pictures.

Up until that time, Ray, of course,

had done all the animation on his own.

(Ray) When Clash Of The Titans

came about,

I found that due to technical difficulties

I had to hire other people

to do some animation.

(Tony) And he found two animators

to help him,

the great Jim Danforth,

an American animator,

and an English animator

called Steve Archer.

Steve did a lot of the Bubo sequences.

Jim, I believe, did a lot

of the Pegasus sequences.

And their input into that film

was just enormous.

When I came to London to do

An American Werewolf In London,

I went to visit him at Pinewood.

He and Jim Danforth were animating

Pegasus, the flying horse,

and it was just extraordinary

how much time it took to light.

I mean, forget the animation,

just to light,

because they had to hide all the wires.

I think I was there four or five hours,

they probably got two or three seconds

of usable footage. I mean, it was amazing!

(Steve Johnson) When an audience

goes to see a movie

and there's a special effect,

it's kind of like

when you go to see a magician.

A magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat.

You know he's not really

pulling that rabbit out of his hat,

but you know he tricked you somehow,

and so you feel involved

because you wanna figure it out.

This is the way it was

with Harryhausen's stuff

from his rear-projection to his

live-action pieces to his stop motion.

How did he do it? One of the drawbacks

to computer animation,

it takes the audience out of the equation.

The audience isn't as involved.

They generally know it's CGI. So I think

it puts a little bit of a distance

between the audience and the movies,

unfortunately.

I remember

in the old James Bond movies

there would always be a huge stunt

at the beginning

and everybody would gasp

because it was so thrilling.

And it was actually being done

in front of their eyes.

Today you could do the same stunt

and people would say, "Oh, CGI."

The second you make a movie

and you see 1,000 soldiers

or 100,000 soldiers running over a hill,

you know that

there are not 100,000 soldiers

available to anybody on the face of

the planet today for any sensible cost.

And so you know that that is not real.

As real as it looks,

you know it's not real.

It's up to you to decide

how far you're gonna allow us

to push the envelope of digital creativity.

You know, you accepted

my digital dinosaurs

because you wanted to enjoy

and be scared by the stories,

so you accepted the digital dinosaurs.

But there is a point

where audiences are going to reject...

...digital special effects

and start to maybe go to movies

where we actually do something

that existed in real space and real time.

Now there are so many effects being done

in so many films

and hundreds or thousands of shots

in each film,

there's a real danger

of the effects not being special any more,

they're too common.

Young people have been brainwashed

by television

to want everything quickly, you know,

and you just can't have an explosion

every five minutes in Greek mythology.

So I felt it was time to retire.

I felt I had had enough.

It's my incredible pleasure to present Ray

with a special BAFTA Award.

(Applause)

We declare the exhibition open!

(Cheering and applause)

(All) J' Happy birthday to you

I Happy birthday to you...

I Happy birthday... I

(Tony) The Ray and Diana Harryhausen

Foundation,

it was set up in the 1980s by Ray

to educate people

into stop motion animation

and also to protect his heritage

for the future.

Preservation, conservation

and other aspects of it

are our major, major priority.

So we're desperately trying to save

the original models

because the material that he makes them

out of, latex rubber, they're so fragile.

Vanessa and Jim Danforth and I

went through Ray's garage in 2008

and found a treasure trove.

I opened up a bag and found, immediately,

a little wooden curlicue,

one of the dragon's horns

from 7th Voyage Of Sinbad

and then the other one.

Then I looked down

and saw a little character

with Curly-toed Shoes. It was Sinbad!

And Jim said, "That's the Sinbad

that was carried aloft by the Roc!"

And then there was a little piece

of rubber and I flipped it over,

it was the harpie's head!

And there were tons of things

and they were all there in the garage

for over 50 years.

And that's the great thing

about Ray Harryhausen's puppets,

he still has the originals, it's amazing.

(Ray) Yeah, that's one of my early

brontosauruses.

(Woman) He's quite big, so...

You'd have to be 3 Greek wrestler

to animate that!

The foundation is preserving

the puppets and moulds

and Ray's diaries, Ray's sketches,

behind the scenes photographs,

his dailies, his daily reels

from all his black and white films.

(Tony) The dailies,

the outtakes from The Beast

right through to 7th Voyage Of Sinbad

are all being preserved now digitally

for the future.

Peter Jackson

volunteered to restore them,

so I went down to New Zealand

and Peter and I recorded it

on high-definition video.

(Tony) Peter Jackson

has been amazingly generous,

not only with time but with preservation.

(John Landis) When Ray visited

Peter Jackson, he went to Weta.

He brought with him

one of the little skeletons

and Peter took it

and had it scanned exactly.

And then from the scan,

they made a mould.

But what's incredible is that

the actual bronze you end up with

isn't a copy of the skeleton,

it is the skeleton, exactly!

I just want to say thank you

to Peter Jackson, Randy Cook,

and all those many others

who've given us support.

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