Developers

Willis O’Brien

Willis O'Brien was a famous special effects and stop motionanimation pioneer. Willis is most famous for his creation of using stop motion animation on King Kong. This had an incredible effect on the audience as nobody had ever seen a stop motion animation so long and detailed before.

Willis had always been very interested in sculpturing. He would produce models with rubber connected on them to bring them to life, which lead on to his talent in stop motion. He then went on to produce some fantastic films using stop motion which proved to be inspirational to other animators and film makers.

Ray Harryhausen }

Ray Harryhausen is one of the most successful stop motion animators in history. Many things inspired him from a young age such as king kong by Willis O'Brien and visits to the Grauman's Chinese Theatre. Once he owned a camera he created stop motion animation films and took his interest in this subject further and studied photography and editing at university. Through doing this, he came up with the idea of creating a film. However his first idea was a flop as his idea on a film about an unusual creature, was unrecognised. His second attempt consisted of dinosaurs as one of the main aspects, which happened to be good quality although it was filmed in a garage. Stop motion animation pioneer George pal, recognised Rays work and hired him to create puppetoons.

From then on, Ray Harryhausen worked on a number of films. He created films which have been recreated today. This shows that his work has inspired and developed ideas into the modern world.


Jan Svankmajer
Born in 1934, Jan Svankmajer is a surrealist film producer from Czech Republic. Jan is most famous for his surrealist films associated with food, although they are not for everyone and at times can be a little disturbing, his work is still massively famous and has inspired other animators such as; The brothers Quay and Terry Gilliam. He has countless amounts of awards for his original and extremely distant work about the relationship of food and humans.

His videos are rather weird, and can be disturbing, but very random and surreal.