Does Ray Harryhausen love Stop-Motion a little too much?

I’ve been reading a book by and about Ray Harryhausen. In it, he describes his experiences on his various movies, and whenever he had to create a creature through any means other than stop-motion, he doesn’t like it as much. On the aliens from Earth vs. the Flying Saucers he says:

I was never happy with these creations. They always looked phoney and stiff, like men in costumes, which is what they were.

In Mysterious Island for a battle with a giant crab, he had a giant claw and a couple of legs made.

Such live action props are always difficult to operate convincingly, although we achieved a considerable rate of success with this by keeping the shots short and cutting into the animation whenever possible.

Nowhere does he question whether stop-motion itself is convincing, even though anyone familiar with it will see it and say, “That’s stop-motion.”

However, I can’t fault him for preferring stop-motion to many other techniques.

The way I see special effects, there are three different goals to achieve.

First is to convey the action. Make sure the audience knows what the effect represents. This is an absolutely necessary goal, and should be the first one you should seek to achieve.

Second is to look cool.

Third is to look real.

Sometimes you can’t always achieve both of the last two goals, so depending on the style of your movie, you should decide which is higher priority.

Both a giant claw and a stop-motion crab will look a little fake, for different reasons. But stop-motion can look cooler than a big prop claw getting waved around, so I can see why Harryhausen might prefer it.

This entry was posted in uncategorized and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.

Comments are closed.