Willis O'Brien was Born in 1886, he is known for working on the original King Kong for 16 years he then went on to work on another gorilla movie called 'Mighty Joe Young'. Although Harry Hausen animated most of the movie, O'Brien came up with the set designs for famous animation film. In 1950, Willis O'Brien was awarded an Oscar for Best visual effects, with King Kong these are best pieces of his work.
O'Brien was so dedicated to the idea of building models and he animated them just like when cartoonists do drawings and make them into motion animation. Willis would move his models by doing a movement frame by frame.
(We know these as armatures) As well as doing this and using stop motion he also including pixilation having real life humans in the movie too which made it look slightly more realistic than just having all armatures. He started creating test reels to sell his unique ideas to producers all around the country.
He produced a short film about a dinosaur fighting a cave man, however it soon developed problems. Being less than a minute and a half long, having jerky movements and the models melting under the lights, O'Brien managed to sell the idea and was handed $5000 to capture another short film. As O'Brien had such a passion for dinosaurs and cave men, 'Dinosaur and the missing link' was created in 1915. The famous Thomas Edison then saw his work and promptly hired Willis O'Brien to produce more short films.
Ray Harryhausen
Ray Harryhausen was an American born on the 29th of June 1920. He specialized in stop motion and model animation. The turning point in his life was when he saw King Kong in 1933. At only 13 years of age Harryhausen started researching the film work and studying everything he could learn about Willis O'Brien and stop motion animation. He was brave enough to get old of O'Brien to show an allosaur short he made. Harryhausen created a whole new animation technique by splitting up the foreground and the background of live action footage this split the 2 images up he then put his models in and re captured it creating the illusion and leaving a very smooth finish.
I Believe without these two outstanding men developing animation we wouldn't be where we are today with our animation.
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