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| FX wizard Ray Harryhausen at work |
As a kid, I was enthralled by films featuring the FX wizardry of Ray Harryhausen. Whether it was the science fiction tale First Men in the Moon, a sword-and-sorcery epic like The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, or a steampunk adventure such as Mysterious Island, I dearly loved them all.
Harryhausen brought all manner of fantastic creatures to life—from winged stallions to a towering cyclops—using Stop-Motion Animation, a process in which an object is physically manipulated by an animator in tiny increments between individual frames of film so that it has the illusion of movement when the film is played back.
The creation of Harryhausen's creatures usually began with stainless steel or aluminum armatures that were then covered in foam latex. For show-biz appeal, he called his stop-motion process Dynamation.
My pet peeve is when people refer to the painstaking effects process Harryhausen used to animate his fantastic creations not as stop-motion animation or even Dynamation but as Claymation instead.
The term Claymation was coined by animator Will Vinton (of California Raisins fame) in the late 1970s to differentiate his FX work from that of his competitors.
Claymation—aka plasticine animation—is a form of stop-motion animation, but one using clay models—as seen in work by Vinton, Art Clokey (Gumby) and Aardman Animations (Wallace and Gromit).
Since Ray Harryhausen's magnificent models were made of foam latex and not clay, it's proper to refer to his work as Stop-Motion Animation or even Dynamation but not Claymation.
I doubt today's dispatch will do anything to correct this common mistake, but as a life-long fan of Ray Harryhausen, I had to try.
There's more to come in the next dispatch.
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