Developers of
Stop Motion
Willis O’Brien developed stop motion animation throughout his career. The Ghost of Slumber Mountain by O’Brien in 1918 was the first film to feature live actors and stop motion together on the screen. In 1925 Willis O’Brien created The Lost World, a film which consisted in part of live action and in part animation too. The dinosaurs were all animated using stop motion animation. At the beginning of production O’Brien could only put the actors on the screen with the dinosaurs by splitting the screen into two parts but over the course of the production he was able to put them together in the same part of the screen as his skills grew. In 1932 producer Merian Cooper hired O’Brien to work on the 1933 King Kong. O’Brien watched gorillas at zoos and wrestling matches in order to properly replicate the movement of gorillas and movement in fight scenes. In his early work he used clay models to create the dinosaurs. He developed these for King Kong by using armature skeletons that he then covered in rubber and fur. To make them as realistic as possible he used inflating and deflating bladders to make them appear to be breathing. This was something that hadn’t been done before and gave his animations a sense of realism that hadn’t been seen in stop motion work before this. Clay models before this didn’t use armatures under the clay so they were harder to create the movement smooth as the models were much less stiff without the skeletons holding them in position. By making the models more realistic the films became much more emmersive and scary as the film showed a realistic gorilla climbing the empire state building, something that previously would not have been shown due to the constraints of making this kind of special effect.
(The Lost World 1925)
(King Kong 1933)