movements of gorillas and apes as well as going to wrestling matches to get ideas of how King Kong
would fight in the movie. O’Brien made 18-inch-high models constructed on metal skeletons with
joint formed of balls and sockets, which were padded with foam rubber and cotton and then
covered with rabbit skin. He helped with the realism and fantasy in the story line, and was later put
down as ‘Chief technician’.
King Kong soon became a box-office blockbuster and a cultural phenomenon as the first “monstermovie”. O’Brien and his team constructed almost all of the scenes of King Kong in the jungles and
city. He made the audiences really believe that New York was under attack. They used life-sized
parts of King Kong for, example a life-sized hand or foot in a few scenes. The scene where King Kong
is on top of the Empire State Building holding Fay Wray and being attacked by planes, is one of the
most famous scenes in film history. Many critics consider O’Brien’s work on King Kong to be the best
use of stop-motion animation in film history, and to be the most successful.
In 1949, O’Brien was credited as a Technical creator for the movie ‘Mighty Joe Young’ and in 1950,
won an Academy Award for Best Visual effects. Credits for the award went to the film’s producers,
RKO Productions, but O’Brien was also awarded a statue. O’Brien’s “protégé”, Ray Harryhausen,
worked alongside O’Brien on this film, and did the majority of the animation.
Ray Harryhausen was an American-British visual
effects creator, writer and producer who created a
form of stop-frame model animation, also known
as “Dynamation”. Dynamation can also be
described as “Split-screen”, because of the way the
two screens appear to be split, whilst the
animation is being moved for each frame, in the
middle of the two screens. 24 separate
photographs had to be taken to make up one
second for the animation. It was designed to merge with live action footage and create the illusion of
a real-world fantasy sequence. Harryhausen was born on June 29th 1920, in Los Angeles. When he
was a child, he was fascinated by the models of sabre-toothed tigers and mammoths at the La Brea
Tar Pits, and spent most of his time trying to recreate the diorama displays he had seen. In 1933,
when he was 13, he went to see King Kong, and was very impressed with Willis O’Brien’s stopmotion sequences. From then, he devoted his time to learning about the stop-motion techniques so
much that he neglected his friends and studies because of his enthusiasm for model-making. He
joined a Sci-Fi club, where he met Sci-Fi Writer Ray Bradbury, whom he became lifelong friends with
and later worked on several films together.
In 1937, Harryhausen made his first stop-motion film named the ‘Cave Bear’, which was made out of
wire, dental filler, cotton padding and a fur coat. It was filmed in a corner of the family’s back
garden, using a 16mm camera. His stop-motion animations involved photographing his model and
then moving them by a fraction to be photographed again, which would give it the appearance of
continuous movement once the images are projected at a fast speed. This process was adopted by
Nick Park, who is the creator of Wallace and Gromit.
In 1939, Harryhausen finally met his role model, Willis O’Brien, who gave him advice on improving
the models’ appearance. From this, Harryhausen was inspired to enrol in anatomy classes to learn