After a while he started experimenting with clay models and within a year had created his first short
film “The Dinosaur and the Missing Link” which was a comedy. He joined a production company
called Edison’s Biography, which he made four short films for. When he left there he wrote, directed
and made the special effects for another four films. One of them, “The Ghost of Slumber Mountain”
which was released in 1919, for the first time attempted to make prehistoric animals look more
lifelike and combined stop-action animation with live action.
In the early 1930’s he had become very interested in jungle movies after the release of Tarzan the
Ape Man in 1932. This is when Merian Cooper to get O’Brien to join work teams to create a good
jungle story. Cooper hired writers to help work on a story idea to do with a giant ape and then shot a
test reel using O’Brian’s sets and dinosaurs that had been made for this production. Finally, the film
was named King Kong.
Over the years of making King Kong O’Brian spent days in the zoo’s trying to study the behaviour and
moment that the gorillas made. He also spent lots of time going to watch wrestling matches to get
idea of how the gorilla and the dinosaur would fight. Despite all the crudeness of the Film
Techniques, many critics consider O’Brian’s work on King Kong to be the greatest use of stop-motion
animation in movie history.
Willis O’Brian made all the figures for the King Kong film. For this film they used the slandered speed
of 24 frames per second in film. He made them so life like and easy to move which was something
that no one in animation had thought of yet. Willis O’Brian took an 18inch figure and made an
immortal colossus out of him, armature with ball and socket joints, covered in rubber, foam and
rabbit fur. Willis O’Brian painted glass to put between the camera and his models to create a dense,
layered jungle. He used a lot of different types of techniques such as rear screen projection for the
actor to react to, he exposed part of the frame while filming the actors and then exposing the rest of