Aw, not Ray. . . .
Well, crap. Ray Harryhausen died today. He was 92.
In 1978, I was taking swimming lessons at the Somerville, NJ YMCA. After a couple years of swimming in the ocean off Salvador (I'm not sure that's the actual beach where we went, but it's close enough) all weekend every weekend for two years and living in Lake Stockholm all the other summers, I don't know what I was expected to learn in an indoor pool. Form? I didn't. But on my way out one morning, I passed a dark room with flickering lights on the far wall. The Monster Club, which got together Saturday mornings to watch movies, had their door propped open. I walked in and was introduced to a world in which Ray Harryhausen was a demigod. When we acquired a super 8 camera, every single movie we made included stop-motion animation, no matter how awkwardly we had to shoehorn it into our sorry scripts. And I was the best and most patient of us, moving every Micronaut (a staple of our scenes) minutely and smoothly and photographing them one frame at a time.
CGI just can't measure up.
In 1978, I was taking swimming lessons at the Somerville, NJ YMCA. After a couple years of swimming in the ocean off Salvador (I'm not sure that's the actual beach where we went, but it's close enough) all weekend every weekend for two years and living in Lake Stockholm all the other summers, I don't know what I was expected to learn in an indoor pool. Form? I didn't. But on my way out one morning, I passed a dark room with flickering lights on the far wall. The Monster Club, which got together Saturday mornings to watch movies, had their door propped open. I walked in and was introduced to a world in which Ray Harryhausen was a demigod. When we acquired a super 8 camera, every single movie we made included stop-motion animation, no matter how awkwardly we had to shoehorn it into our sorry scripts. And I was the best and most patient of us, moving every Micronaut (a staple of our scenes) minutely and smoothly and photographing them one frame at a time.
CGI just can't measure up.