Customer Reviews

The Dinosaur Films of Ray Harryhausen: Features, Early 16mm Experiments and Unrealized Projects

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This book is awesome from all the aspects of each of Harryhausen's dinosaur projects. Things are discussed that never have really surfaced in any other Harryhausen books. The only down sides are that it's not a better quality paper and lack of any color photos. Some photos appear blurry also. Overall, a great book if you want more than just pictures.

Ray Harryhausen was a pioneer of the cinema. He was the man whose expanded and advanced the utilization of "stop-motion" animation. This was the labor intensive and painstaking practice of making models and puppets seem to come alive through moving slightly moving them and taking a photograph of each movement, then position them again, taking another photograph, repeating the process again and again. Running those still photographs through a film projector gave the fascinating illusion of movement that was a popular breakthrough in "special effects" for early fantasy movies featuring all manner of monsters and dinosaurs. In particular, Harryhausen was essential to bringing to life the dinosaurs and prehistoric creatures that were integral to his four classic Hollywood films: "One Million Years B.C.", "The Beasts from 20,000 Fathoms", "The Animal World", and "The Valley of Gwangi". Harryhausen developed stop-motion animation techniques that were to influence subsequent generations of film makers and special effects professionals down to this very day. In The Dinosaur Films Of Ray Harryhausen: Features, Early 16mm Experiments And Unrealized Projects, Roy P. Webber provides a complete history of Harryhausen's cinematic work that rises to the level of archetypal scholarship, including an informative perspective on the pale ontological accuracy of the saurians from a contemporary perspective given the advances of paleontology over the past few decades. Of special note is the exhaustive appendix regarding dinosaur-related films that Harryhausen had a hand in. Nicely illustrated throughout with vintage photos and a "must" read for all Ray Harryhausen fans, The Dinosaur Films Of Ray Harryhausen is a core addition to professional and academic library Cinematic Studies and Film History reference collections.

Ray Harryhausen was a pioneer of the cinema. He was the man whose expanded and advanced the utilization of "stop-motion" animation. This was the labor intensive and painstaking practice of making models and puppets seem to come alive through moving slightly moving them and taking a photograph of each movement, then position them again, taking another photograph, repeating the process again and again. Running those still photographs through a film projector gave the fascinating illusion of movement that was a popular breakthrough in "special effects" for early fantasy movies featuring all manner of monsters and dinosaurs. In particular, Harryhausen was essential to bringing to life the dinosaurs and prehistoric creatures that were integral to his four classic Hollywood films: "One Million Years B.C.", "The Beasts from 20,000 Fathoms", "The Animal World", and "The Valley of Gwangi". Harryhausen developed stop-motion animation techniques that were to influence subsequent generations of film makers and special effects professionals down to this very day. In The Dinosaur Films Of Ray Harryhausen: Features, Early 16mm Experiments And Unrealized Projects, Roy P. Webber provides a complete history of Harryhausen's cinematic work that rises to the level of archetypal scholarship, including an informative perspective on the pale ontological accuracy of the saurians from a contemporary perspective given the advances of paleontology over the past few decades. Of special note is the exhaustive appendix regarding dinosaur-related films that Harryhausen had a hand in. Nicely illustrated throughout with vintage photos and a "must" read for all Ray Harryhausen fans, The Dinosaur Films Of Ray Harryhausen is a core addition to professional and academic library Cinematic Studies and Film History reference collections.

Ray Harryhausen was a pioneer of the cinema. He was the man whose expanded and advanced the utilization of "stop-motion" animation. This was the labor intensive and painstaking practice of making models and puppets seem to come alive through moving slightly moving them and taking a photograph of each movement, then position them again, taking another photograph, repeating the process again and again. Running those still photographs through a film projector gave the fascinating illusion of movement that was a popular breakthrough in "special effects" for early fantasy movies featuring all manner of monsters and dinosaurs. In particular, Harryhausen was essential to bringing to life the dinosaurs and prehistoric creatures that were integral to his four classic Hollywood films: "One Million Years B.C.", "The Beasts from 20,000 Fathoms", "The Animal World", and "The Valley of Gwangi". Harryhausen developed stop-motion animation techniques that were to influence subsequent generations of film makers and special effects professionals down to this very day. In The Dinosaur Films Of Ray Harryhausen: Features, Early 16mm Experiments And Unrealized Projects, Roy P. Webber provides a complete history of Harryhausen's cinematic work that rises to the level of archetypal scholarship, including an informative perspective on the pale ontological accuracy of the saurians from a contemporary perspective given the advances of paleontology over the past few decades. Of special note is the exhaustive appendix regarding dinosaur-related films that Harryhausen had a hand in. Nicely illustrated throughout with vintage photos and a "must" read for all Ray Harryhausen fans, The Dinosaur Films Of Ray Harryhausen is a core addition to professional and academic library Cinematic Studies and Film History reference collections.