Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan Page #8

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.

(Ray) 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 Films.

It's sad because a lot of people feel

it's one of our better pictures, too.

(J' Rousing

orchestral music)

(Narrator) '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)

(Ray) 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.

(J' 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 gonna 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.

(Joe Dante) 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.

(Narrator) '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.'

(Ray) We were originally going to shoot

The Golden Voyage in Indiai/,

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.

(J' Sitar music)

(Ray) 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.

(Narrator) '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.

Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger

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.

(John Lasseter) 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 wanna make

things that are absolutely perfectly real.

We like to, like Ray,

take a step back from reality.

(Ray) 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.

(Dennis Muren) 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.

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