about musculature. By 1940, he began to work on an epic feature length-film which was about the prehistoric life on earth.
Harryhausen was in need of a job which would finance future projects, so he showed his unfinished“ Evolution” piece to the producer George Pal, who described it as“ Brilliant”, and offered Harryhausen a job on a series of short films he was producing, Puppetoons. Harryhausen worked alongside George Pal for two years, who went on to win several Oscars for his work.
In 1953, Harryhausen was given charge of his first feature film, with Charles H Scheener as producer. It was called‘ Beast from 20,000 Fathoms’. It was an adaptation of one of Ray Bradbury’ s stories, and the two of them worked together on the film. It was shot on a very low budget, as Harryhausen could not afford high speed film and had to animate each of the scenes by hand. The feature film proved popular with the public after its release. By 1958, Harryhausen had gained international recognition after he created the special effects for the‘ Seventh Voyage of Sinbad’, which also proved popular at the box office, and grossed over $ 6 million. It took over a year to compete because they shot the stop-motion in colour, which made it complicated to complete. This was his first colour film.
Harryhausen moved to the UK in the 1960’ s, making him a dual US-UK citizen, where he lived in London until he died in 2013. During his life, his original style of special-effects in films, inspired several other filmmakers, such as George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson and Tim Burton.
Lotte Reiniger was born on 2 June 1899 in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin and died in 1981. She was a German film director and the leading pioneer of Silhouette Animation. Silhouette Animation is a type of animation which the characters are only visible as black silhouettes. It is usually done with backlighting and cardboard cut-outs. As a child, Reiniger enjoyed the Chinese art of shadow puppetry, inspiring her to create her own silhouette animations for a parental audience. In the 1920’ s, Reiniger made short animations, including‘ Cinderella’ in 1922, and an animated fairy-tale feature film named‘ The Adventures of Prince Achmed’ in 1926, which was one of the first animated feature-length films. It failed to find a distributor for almost a year, but once it premiered in Paris, it was a huge success. In 1929, Lotte Reiniger co-directed her first German live-action film, but unfortunately, the film was completed just as sound was introduced to Germany, and so the release of the film was delayed until 1930, to dub in voices by different actors, which turned out a disappointing result.