Chapter 7: Animate Monsters Ray Harryhausen Ray Harryhausen was born in 1920 and saw the film King Kong at the impressionable age of 13. From that point on, a lifelong ambition and career were born to one of the great classic animators of the 20th century. Harryhausen was so mesmerized by the film that he studied it endlessly and set about his own research and experimentation in the art. This eventually led to him to work with O'Brien on Mighty Joe Young in 1949. Harryhausen had finally got to collaborate alongside his mentor and animated some of the most heartfelt scenes of the film, breathing life into a stop motion gorilla. The alliance was short lived as O'Brien had difficulty launching new projects and Harryhausen had to strike out on his own in a new world of frugal independent film budgets. Harryhausen was a multitalented animator who worked alone and did almost all of the work himself. This proved daunting if he attempted to adopt the same large glass paintings used by O'Brien in his work. Harryhausen had to devise a system that was economical in time and expense in order to compete in the low-budget world. He created a system that was to become the foundation for stop motion film compositing. Dynamation Because Harryhausen needed to work in small spaces and large glass matte paintings were far too unwieldy and expensive, he found a way to utilize a variation of O'Brien's methods to streamline the animation process. In Harryhausen's method, dubbed Dynamation, he would go to the live-action set and shoot the live action without the use of any mattes in front of the lens. He locked off the camera and kept a well-thought-