Having done absolutely nothing last weekend except a bit of spackling and painting – plans for a baseball game and barbecue were canceled due to a death in a friend’s family – it was nice to go out last night and raise the have-a-life quotient ever so slightly. Jamie, Carrie and I went to see the short film The Story of the Tortoise and the Hare at the Egyption as part of the Seattle International Film Festival. It was the latest short by Ray Harryhausen, and then he himself then was interviewed live for over an hour. It was a very cool talk. Harryhausen is not quite as high in my pantheon as Stan Lee as I don’t recall ever sitting down and watching one of his monster movies all the way through as a kid. But those sequences such as the skeleton battles from Jason and the Argonauts do seem to be part of that consciousness shared by all geeks, even more so by us visual effects types. And as far as lives led, he’s had a fascinating one. He talked about his inspiration at the age of thirteen watching King Kong, then mentioned his early work with people like Ray Bradbury, Frank Capra, and Dr. Seuss, and moved from there to a couple of points about each of the major movies in his canon.
A funny moment: they showed one of those 50′s style studio promotion clips for The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. After the point was driven home (“DYNAMATION! It’s.. DYNAMATION! Done by.. DYNAMATION! Amazing.. DYNAMATION!”) the narrator breathlessly described a special effect: “The amazing shrinking effect on Princess Parisa was done by keeping Kathryn Grant tied to a stake, ensuring that she didn’t move her arm.. and then moving the camera back 40 feet.” Special effects were somehow much cooler in those days. Harryhausen pointed out that Dynamation was just a gimmick term invented after someone drove around in a Buick and saw the word Dynaflow inside it. After Sinbad, the studio realised they needed to make it appear the technological barriers kept going up, so they touted “Super Dynamation” for the next movie, followed by “Electrolytic Dynamation”. Yeah, some things don’t change either.
He seemed mildly disdainful of CGI (“cold”, he put it); said something amusing about the violent content of today’s movies shocking the devil himself (after mentioning how the skeleton sequences were censored); mentioned that although he liked the recent work in Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach it was “puppet work”, and not the kind of stop motion he did. He then said something very interesting: that he was drawn to the type of stop motion work he did because of the dream-like quality of it – that the viewer would watch the effect, know immediately that it wasn’t real, but not know quite how it was done. He especially decried the recent trend to talk about how effects are done even before the movie comes out and how the best sequences are shown in the commercials and trailers beforehand.
These last few points resonated with me. Compared to that tangible feeling you get from working in stop motion, CGI does seem a little cold by comparison, and it’s sad that it seems to be wiping these other styles of visual effects into the history books. Terminator 2 is an interesting case in point. The second disk of that DVD set is fascinating not only because it shows off old-school effects work ats its finest, but it also marks the beginning of the rise of CGI dominance. If you watch the amount of work put into the miniatures for the nuclear explosion sequence or the truck explosions, and then compare that with the T-1000 liquid metal effects on the computer monitor, there’s no question in my mind as to which I would have preferred to work on.
