Ray Harryhausen

Often artists, animators and filmmakers will reference their own body language and facial features when creating a character to make the movements more realistic, sophisticated and something that the audience will be more willing to buy into. Adding even small gestures and expressions can convey character and personality, which is especially vital to a character that has no dialogue, like, say, a dinosaur or a skeleton warrior or a six-armed octopus.

Ray Harryhausen, one of the greatest visual effects creators in film history, built his entire career (and legacy) on the understanding of what would bring fantasy and imagination to life on the big screen in the way that was real for the viewer.

Ray would throw himself into his work, often acting alongside actors and directing on set though the sequences he had already storyboarded and would be animating later. Directors often would disapprove of Ray working on set, unsure of why exactly he was there. Ray would work in place of where the monster would be and provide direction to the actors, who would be working with little more than a drawing and Ray’s direction.

Caroline Munro remembers working with Ray on the set of “The Golden Voyage of Sinbad.”

“Working with Ray Harryhausen was the most amazing experience for me. I was a very unknown actress and had never worked with his stop motion animation. There was nothing to work with. Ray used to us these wonderful drawings that he’d done. He’d 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.’”

Munro continued by adding that during one sequence where her character faced one of his fiecersome creatures, “His eye-line was a stick so he’d have this stick and on the end of this stick, he’d drawn this eye, which for me was the centaur’s eye and Ray would wield the eye.”

Martine Beswick, actress in "One Million Years BC" recalls an instance with Ray on set. “I remember one scene when these pterodactyls were coming over us, and we didn’t know this, we didn’t see this, but Ray got onto a flat bed truck and drove in front of us while we in our little wet, skimpy pieces of leather brandished our spears at these things.”

Harryhausen’s dedication to bringing his vision to life shows through not only in his work on his many models and drawings, but in his directing and acting. Ray’s gift for breathing life and character into creatures built his career and his legacy.