Born in Los Angeles in 1920, Ray Harryhausen was lucky enough to find his calling at age 13 when he saw King Kong, a film that marked the beginning of a lifelong love of creating and giving cinematic life to the prehistoric and the mythical. Fascinated by the novelty mechanics that made Kong so successful, he delved into experimenting on how they worked, and, inspired by the work of his mentor and Kong’s animator, Willis O’Brian, decided then and there to go into pictures. The rest is well known history. Mr Spielberg will tell you all about it.

His talent for mechanics combined with an early love of literature (sci-fi, fantasy, adventure, mythology) and of art (in particular Gustave Doré), not forgetting an avid interest in dinosaurs long before they became trendy, all contributed to making Harryhausen much more than an expert craftsman. As a producer, many of the ideas for the films he worked on were his: he was involved in developing storyboards, set design, finding locations, film promotion and was a major contributor to his films from beginning to end.

Today Mr Harryhausen’s reputation is such that actors and directors have been relegated to second billing: the films he worked on are known as “Harryhausen pictures”. His live action worlds of mythic heroes, hydra, bold and sassy skeletons, medusas, and other creatures and monsters – poetic, ambiguous, removed in time – still fascinate us today. They remind us of what is lacking in the pat and perfect CGIs: like the airbrushed pinup, they dazzle only briefly.

What’s Ray Harryhausen doing today? Check it out at www.rayharryhausen.com and you’ll see that the wands of creation are still pointing in his direction. Nearing his 90s, some genie from Sinbad must have granted him a gift of eternal creativity.

Many of Ray Harryhausen’s original models used in his films are displayed at the Berlin Film Museum/Potsdammer Strasser2/ Berlin.

If skeletons shimmy and Medusa moans – then it’s stop motion honed to near perfection by Ray Harryhausen Stop motion dimensional animation is as old as the motion picture itself, and is an art more easily seen than achieved. Like the simple animated cartoon, the illusion of movement is created by shooting each frame of motion picture film separately. But unlike the hand-drawn cartoon, a dimensional jointed model is used, carefully changing its position through a few millimetres of space and then exposing a single frame of film to the new position. Light levels, background positioning and foreground area are identical in each exposure. Viewed at 24 frames per second, the speed at which sound film is projected, the motion becomes fluid, giving the viewer the illusion of movement. (Ray Harryhausen – An Animated Life. Ray Harryhausen and Tony Dalton, Billboard Books New York, 2004).