To make “The Three Worlds of Gulliver” (1959), which required combining footage of giant and tiny live actors in the same shot, Mr. He upgraded his techniques and ambitions (though not always his budgets) with three more black-and-white science fiction pictures, but, he told the interviewer Christopher Bahn, in 2006, “I got tired of destroying cities.” In 1958, he moved into color and the realm of mythical adventure with “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad,” creating a milieu, effects and characters that he would return to in “Jason and the Argonauts” and two more Sinbad films. Harryhausen’s early working years as a technician making stop-motion “Puppetoon” shorts for Paramount, humorous animated training films for the Army during World War II and, after the war, his own animated short films of Mother Goose stories and some advertising work. O’Brien’s advice, he studied anatomy and sculpture and took night classes in film production. O’Brien and showed him some early work on Mr. While still in high school, he got an appointment to meet Mr. Harryhausen was soon teaching himself the basics of stop-motion animation and producing short films of dinosaurs and apes in the family garage. With help from his parents - especially his father, a machinist and inventor - Mr.
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“My work, and therefore to a large extent my life, have been tied to a specific film and the man responsible for it,” he wrote in his 2003 autobiography (written with Tony Dalton), “ Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life.” He found his life’s work when, as a teenager in 1933, he saw “King Kong,” one of the first two feature films to use stop-motion, the other being “The Lost World” (1925), both the handiwork of the pioneering animator Willis O’Brien. Raymond Frederick Harryhausen was born in Los Angeles on June 29, 1920, the only child of doting parents, Fred and Martha, who encouraged his fascination with dinosaurs, fantasy fiction, movies and art. He frequently proposed the initial concept, scouted the locations and shaped the story, script, art direction and design around his ideas for fresh ways to amaze an audience. Harryhausen usually played a principal creative role in the films featuring his work.
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Though his on-screen credit was often simply “technical effects” or “special visual effects,” Mr. Harryhausen created and photographed many of the most memorable fantasy-adventure sequences in movie history: the atomically awakened dinosaur that lays waste to Coney Island in “ The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms” the sword fight between Greek heroes and skeleton warriors in “ Jason and the Argonauts” the swooping pterodactyl that carries off Raquel Welch in “ One Million Years B.C.” Often working alone or with a small crew, Mr. Ray Harryhausen, the animator and special-effects wizard who found ways to breathe cinematic life into the gargantuan, the mythical and the extinct, died on Tuesday in London.