Mike Tharme, Continuing the Snowball.

Throughout Ray's career, his creatures always had human counterparts to act off or with, none of his pictures was ever truly a human-less feature, so none of his creatures were required to talk to "describe" to audiences story details or scenes, even Bubo the Owl "dialog" was translated through Harry Hamlin. Ray's Brontosaurus during filming of Evolution of the World In the 1940's, Ray did begin work on a project which was going by the title "Evolution of the World" but was abandoned after seeing Disney's Fantasia. I often wondered while working on my own project what Ray had planned to do with this film had he actually completed it? Would it have been something like Fantasia with a music score and animal sounds or would it have been something more closer to a dinosaur wildlife documentary. Sadly we'll never truly know, but I do hope my own film may give a glimmer of insight on what it could have been like. When discussing my...

I've made a bit of a realization about my puppet sizes, I've been working to the wrong scale the whole time...well not quite wrong, but wrong for the purpose of my animation. Allow me to explain a little better. During the early planning stages, I've been studying all of the books on Harryhausen models, mainly The Art of Ray Harryhausen and the 2012 publication of Ray Harryhausen's Fantasy Scrapbook. In my observations, I've realized something, something so important it could have resulted in a very costly production. My project is referencing Ray's unfinished project "Evolution of the World" but, none of the photos of the puppets from this project have dimensions to show their scale, however, Ray's later projects, such as One Million Years B.C and The Valley of Gwangi, has the relevant information regarding such details. So I've been using those as my puppet scale reference points in how big and wide these puppets should be, becaus...

Priour to recieving my armature parts from animation toolkit I started to look into Ray Harryhausen's designs of his own ceratopsian dinosaurs. Studying both his original Triceratops armature from the 1930's and the plans from his One Million Years B.C design. It was quite interesting to compare the two together, seeing how much Ray has learned since his early days of armature engineering to his peak of his career work.  "Evolution of the World" Triceratops armature. I noticed major changes between the two designs, the first one obviously been the number of joints in the puppets. In Evolution the are numerous joints sharing the same ball joint and the use of ribs to keep the core hollow, which also appear to be fixed in position; whilst the One Million Triceratops has lost the ribs and uses a much "sleeker" design, this could display the lessons learned from Ray's earlier attempts or that the particular method of armature building was more cumbers...

I am very pleased to announce the arrival of my Anibuild armature parts from Animation Toolkit, which are based in the Manchester area. I am extremely grateful to also say that Animation Toolkit are sponsoring the construction of these armatures, an offer I am very humbled by and indebted to. Animation Toolkit have been a real friend to me since 2012 when they announced their Ray Harryhausen Armacreature kit, as well as all the opportunities they have offered me over the years, from assisting the build of  250+ armatures for the Chuck Steel: Night of the Trampires feature film to making a custom Dragon armature to display the construction possibilities with their parts. I'll be publishing a future post about the construction of these armature. Here I want to talk a little bit more about the parts I have ordered, starting with the Ball joints, Chest & Hip plates and finishing on the Paddles and Rods. I hope for those of you who have seen their site and are thinking ...

I went to visit the Ray Harryhausen exhibit at the Tate Britain Museum in November. I wasn't exactly sure what to expect but I knew there was a few models and paintings from Ray's inspirations. Bellow are photos with some notes I have made from my close observations of the stop-motion puppets and bronzes that were on display. Original Skeleton with Gorgon  Shield Closer inspection of the neck bones reveals that the bones are in fact painted on and therefore hiding the double joint inside. On the sword holding hand I noticed the fingers are designed as a solid mass but also had a peice of wire inserted through and hooked togeather on the oposite side to keep the sword in place I'm also unsure as to the origin of the sword design, this appears to be more in keeping with an Arabic design rather than the Grecian sword I would expect. This could be due to a misplaced prop which was attached when Ray was alive or this is the original Sinbad L...

Most modern storyboards that are made in the industry tend to be done through digital illustration, whether through Photoshop or a specific Storyboarding program. But seeing as I want to stick closely to Ray Harryhausen's own techniques, I have decided to opt for sticking with hand drawn pencil storyboards. Throughout Ray's career he used pencil or pen drawings which tend to have very strong shapes, scribble or lined shading and were always very rough, but still visible enough to allow himself or other film crew and cast members to see what was going on in the shot. One animator I saw at the Bradford Animation Festival many years ago once said that storyboards that held this rough approach captured a level of purity about the action the animator needed to capture for their film and that by refining it into a sharper image lost the energy they initially infused into that one board. Now, Storyboarding has no right or wrong way of being drawn, however, the industry prefers...