00:10When I was a kid, I saw Jason and the Argonauts.
00:14That movie just melted my brain.
00:19Everything was clicking for me.
00:21It started a lifelong quest to figure out how this stuff is done.
00:25And the impact of that movie was the work of one man,
00:29stop-motion animator, Ray Harryhausen.
00:35I'm Alec Gillis, and I'm a creature effects designer,
00:38and I'm probably responsible for the best parts of your childhood trauma.
00:42Movies going back to Aliens, the original Predator, Tremors,
00:49Starship Troopers, on up to the recent movie Prey.
00:55I grew up in Orange County.
00:57I used to go to Disneyland every weekend,
01:00and I would look at these amazing animatronics,
01:02and that was imprinting in my brain.
01:04But it was really the work of Ray Harryhausen that set me on my path.
01:09When I was about five years old, my father woke me up and said,
01:13you got to see this, because it was the network premiere of Jason and the Argonauts.
01:18So I was kind of bleary-eyed, staring at the TV, watching a guy throwing the teeth of the Hydra
01:24onto the ground and summoning forth the victims of the Hydra.
01:29And that alone was creepy and scary, in part because that guy was wearing a miniskirt.
01:33But when the skeletons come up through the ground,
01:37I remember thinking, how did they do this?
01:41Bernard Herrmann's music is going,
01:44and then they crouch,
01:46and then they scream.
01:49I don't know how they screamed.
01:50They have no vocal cords.
01:52Didn't matter.
01:52Scared the crap out of me.
01:56Just reciting that right now gives me chills.
01:59And that's kind of what I'm always trying to recreate for an audience in my own work,
02:03to give them the feeling that I had when I first saw that scene.
02:07These days, if you look at the credits of any special effects-based film,
02:11you will see literally hundreds of people.
02:13Back in Ray Harryhausen's day, it's one name, and it was Ray.
02:19Stop-motion is a form of animation wherein you take a puppet and you incrementally move it,
02:26take a frame, incrementally move it again, take another frame.
02:29I think we're all pretty familiar with that, but he didn't have any way to replay
02:33immediately what he had just done.
02:35It was all in his brain, and it was all coming out of his fingertips in a linear, free-form
02:40fashion.
02:41And when you realize how difficult and how analog that art form is,
02:46it actually makes it more impressive to me.
02:52Talos really blew me and my buddies away.
02:55I can remember for years we would like play Jason and the Argonauts,
02:59and you'd jump up on the hood of your mom's car and strike that pose and then go,
03:03and turn your head and look at your buddies and everybody freaks out.
03:08It was such a creepy use of stop-motion. Ray Harryhausen actually made his animation a little
03:14stiffer in order to make it look like it was made from metal.
03:21And then you have the Hydra, which is the seven-headed snake creature. That character still
03:26rings in my head as one of the greatest creature designs ever. The way the body sprouts those heads,
03:33the way they all come off from the central stalk is anatomically believable.
03:38But my favorite scene is the skeleton fight.
03:42He had seven of them, all with multiple joints, and he had to keep track over a four-month period
03:48of
03:48how each skeleton was moving, and he's imbuing each one with its own character. It's a phenomenal feat of brain
03:55work.
03:58I realize that my infatuation with Ray Harryhausen is not unique. He's affected and impacted just about
04:05everybody in Hollywood. From Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, James Cameron, actors as well. Tom Hanks is a
04:12huge fan. I think that goes beyond his abilities as a special effects artist. It's that he is an auteur.
04:20He created these films with a spirit of adventure and character that really no one else has replicated.
04:28I just wanted to be Ray Harryhausen. That's all I wanted.
