Harryhausen and Stop Motion Technique

[ulthar]

Have any of you watched the Harryhausen Chronicles that is on the DVD versions of some of his movies (for example, Earth vs The Flying Saucers and 20,000,000 Miles to Earth)?

I always imagined doing stop motion was a precise, very "engineered" technique.  Though that's not the way *I* did it while playing around (and my results of course looked very amateurish).  In fact, watching Harryhausen doing it, it looks very haphazard.  He just wiggles things around and takes a shot, wiggles things around and takes a shot, etc.

Very different from what I envisioned.  It actually gives me a whole new respect for just how 'real' some of his animations are.

[odinn7]

I've made many 8mm stop-go films when I was younger. I always thought it was a precision operation too. You mean to tell me that all those years I was pretty much doing the same thing as the master? I could've been the next master? (well, if not for computers).

[trekgeezer]

I like when he mentions during the documentary on TCM, that having to answer the phone while working would really screw things. He would come back and forget the last movement he had filmed.

What is hard to believe is how much work it took and that he generally worked alone.

[Ed, Ego and Superego]

I saw a piece on Ardman animation's work (Wallace and Gromit), and they are very painstaking.  It took them a whole day to do seconds of footage.  They really worked to get consistent and realistic movement
-Ed

[PSlugworth]

Many stop-motion animators would use an exposure sheet to time their shots out, but Harryhausen did not.  He does (or did), I'm sure, note certain key frames in order to time with the actors movements -- especially in scenes like the skeleton fights in the 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts!  But as for precisely planning every tiny movement out ahead of time, I guess he felt that it would look more nautral if he "acted" the movements out himself in real time with the puppets.

A lot of animators today use video to see how their animation is progressing as they work on it, but Harryhausen has said a few times that even if the technology had existed for him he would have preferred not to use it, as he always felt that it was more important to see where the action was going rather than where he had already been.

[ulthar]

That's interesting what you mentioned about key frames.  I was watching a piece on the Looney Tunes DVD the other day that was talking about Chuck Jones drawing about every 20th frame or so; the animators only filled in frames between those Jones drew.