{"id":48550,"date":"2024-04-15T12:29:10","date_gmt":"2024-04-15T10:29:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sciencefictionfestival.org\/guest\/ray-harryhausen\/"},"modified":"2024-04-15T12:30:01","modified_gmt":"2024-04-15T10:30:01","slug":"ray-harryhausen","status":"publish","type":"guest","link":"https:\/\/www.sciencefictionfestival.org\/en\/guest\/ray-harryhausen\/","title":{"rendered":"Ray Harryhausen"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Ray Harryhausen<\/h1>\n

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Premio Urania d’argento 2008<\/h4>\n

[\/vc_column_text][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1706793239279{margin-top: 40px !important;margin-bottom: 20px !important;}”]To the delight of cinema audiences the world over, Ray Harryhausen has made dinosaurs walk the earth, horses fly, statues come to life, apes play chess, and skeletons fight. Harryhausen calls his work \u201ckinetic sculpture\u201d; it is a method of stop-motion filmmaking that has made him a cult figure in the world of cinema.
\nBorn in Los Angeles, June 29, 1920, Ray Harryhausen was educated at Audubon Junior High and Manual Arts High School.
\nSchool held little interest for him, but at an early age he conceived an overwhelming passion for the film King Kong, a fascination which became the basis of his future life.
\n\u201cI first saw King Kong by accident,\u201d he has said, \u201cMy aunt was a nurse and had been taking care of Sid Grauman\u2019s mother. She was given three tickets for the film and took my mother and myself. I haven\u2019t been the same since.\u201d
\nHarryhausen became fascinated with the film because he couldn\u2019t determine how it was done. He knew it was not a man in an ape suit and soon learned that the film\u2019s creator was Willis O\u2019Brien. \u201cI was in awe of O\u2019Brien\u2019s ability to produce on the screen the illusion of life.\u201d Harryhausen remarked.
\nThe film inspired Harryhausen to begin experimenting with his own models. The first was a Cave Bear fabricated from his mother\u2019s fur coat. Borrowing a friend\u2019s 16mm camera, Harryhausen made his first attempts at stop-motion photography. The camera was difficult to control, but he says, \u201cthe excitement of seeing the bear move was quite satisfying, which encouraged me to do more\u201d. He found that his interest in this form of cinema was so great that he began to look for ways to develop his hobby into a career. To this end, he went to night school at the University of Southern California and studied all aspects of trick photography, from matte shots to double exposure.
\nHarryhausen established a studio in a corner of the family\u2019s back porch and his father, always encouraging Ray\u2019s ambitions, later built him a studio at the back of the garage. By 1940, he owned his own singleframe camera and had begun work on
\nhis first feature-length film, Evolution, an intricate film based on the origin of the species. Unfortunately for Ray, Disney released Fantasia and he realized there was no point in continuing. He decided the time had come to get a job and showed his footage of Evolution to George Pal.
\nPal, who made shorts called Puppetoons, thought Harryhausen\u2019s work brilliant and hired him.
\nHarryhausen worked with Pal until 1942, when he was drafted into the Army Signal Corps. He was lucky to be assigned to the film unit and spent the war making animated segments for orientation films.
\nDischarged at war\u2019s end, Harryhausen went back to his garage studio and decided to make a series of fairy tales, beginning with a ten-minute film called Mother Goose Stories. After some setbacks, the film was released by Bailey Films and, with the money he earned, Harryhausen was able to make four more fairy tales.
\nRay Harryhausen\u2019s hero remained Willis O\u2019Brien, creator of King Kong. In 1939, he had summoned the courage to telephone O\u2019Brien and arrange a meeting.
\nO\u2019Brien had been critical of his work, although in a constructive way, but obviously remembered Harryhausen\u2019s talent. In 1946, O\u2019Brien asked Harryhausen if he would like to assist in the production of Mighty Joe Young, the story of an enormous ape. Naturally delighted, Harryhausen moved into the RKO Studios and the film, finally released in 1949, won O\u2019Brien an Oscar.
\nO\u2019Brien\u2019s next project, The Valley of the Mist, ran into pre-production problems and Ray Harryhausen returned to his fairy tales.
\nThen a friend introduced him to a producer, Jack Dietz, who wanted to make a monster movie. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), Harryhausen\u2019s first feature-length film, was based on long-time friend Ray Bradbury\u2019s story of a dinosaur rising from the sea in answer to a foghorn, thinking it to be a mating call.
\nA young producer who had worked for Universal and Columbia, Charles H. Schneer wanted to make a picture about a giant octopus that pulls down the Golden Gate Bridge. Called It Came From Beneath the Sea, the film was a success and also marked the foundation of a professional partnership between Schneer and Harryhausen that endured nearly 30 years.
\nHarryhausen and Schneer produced a trio of films during the height of the science fiction boom of the 1950s including the aforementioned It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955), Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers (1956) and 1957\u2019s 20 Million Miles to Earth.
\nAll of these low-budget, black-and-white films were enlivened by Harryhausen\u2019s developing artistry and innovation within the field of stop-motion animation.
\nAt the end of the 1950s, Harryhausen and Schneer made a distinct break away from science fiction into the fertile world of fantasy, fairy tales, and myth, with their groundbreaking and highly acclaimed The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. This film was also Harryhausen\u2019s first opportunity to experiment with color, and its success was such that it led to a trilogy of highly popular Sinbad movies, culminating in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger in 1977. The late 1950s\/early 1960s also saw Harryhausen and Schneer moving their production base from Hollywood to London, where they could utilize the technical expertise of British studios and crews while also being able to film at various exotic European locations, particularly in Spain.
\nIn 1963, Ray produced arguably his most famous film, Jason and the Argonauts, which is also regarded by Harryhausen himself as his most complete film, incorporating as it does much of his most seamless and yet outstanding stop-motion animation in many memorable sequences, not least of which is the famous fight between Jason and the supernatural skeletons of the dead.
\nDuring the 1960s, Harryhausen also contributed to notable films such as The First Men in the Moon in 1964, One Million Years BC in 1966 and The Valley of Gwangi in 1969. He finally brought the curtain down on his film career in 1981 with his and Schneer\u2019s Greek mythological epic, Clash of the Titans. In 1992, at the sixtyfourth Academy Awards, Harryhausen was honored with an Oscar for his lifetime of extraordinary achievements.
\nIn 2003, Harryhausen was honored with a star on the legendary Hollywood Walk of Fame; in 2004, his large-format book, Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life was published; and 2005 saw the release of an elaborate two-disc DVD, Ray Harryhausen: The Early Years Collection, containing all of Harryhausen\u2019s early short films, tests, and experiments.
\nIn February 2008, Ray Harryhausen was honored by The Art Directors Guild at its 12th Annual Awards ceremony for his \u201cOutstanding Contribution to Cinematic Imagery.\u201d
\nHarryhausen has finished his third largeformat book, written with Tony Dalton, in which they detail the history of stop-motion animation worldwide.[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][vc_column width=”1\/5″][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row full_width=”stretch_row”][vc_column][vc_empty_space height=”50px”][vc_basic_grid post_type=”film” max_items=”-1″ gap=”0″ orderby=”title” order=”ASC” item=”43419″ initial_loading_animation=”none” grid_id=”vc_gid:1706793842230-2e8fd507-afff-4″ taxonomies=”545″ el_id=””][vc_separator border_width=”2″ css=”.vc_custom_1706524927884{margin-top: 40px !important;}”][vc_column_text]<\/p>\n

TS+FF Guests of Honor<\/h5>\n

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2008 Silver Urania Award More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":45975,"menu_order":2008,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"yes"},"categories":[],"tags":[581,571],"class_list":{"0":"post-48550","1":"guest","2":"type-guest","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"tag-guest-2008-en","8":"tag-silver-urania"},"yoast_head":"\nRay Harryhausen - Trieste Science+Fiction Festival<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Ray Harryhausen - 2008 Trieste Science+Fiction Festival Silver Urania Award\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencefictionfestival.org\/en\/guest\/ray-harryhausen\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Ray Harryhausen - Trieste Science+Fiction Festival\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Ray Harryhausen - 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