> Ray Harryhausen (1920-2013) was a special effects artist in motion pictures; his specialty was stop-motion animation (moving small ball-and-socket based models one frame at a time, which gives the illusion of life when projected at 24 frames a second), but he also designed all of his effects scenes, from drawing the initial concepts, controlling the live-action filming and completing the final composites. So "in control" was he that the movies that feature his effects are most often called "Ray Harryhausen movies" rather than being labeled with the name of the director or writer or actor involved.

> Harryhausen worked on just sixteen feature films in the course of his career, between 1949 and 1981; he often said in interviews that Jason and the Argonauts was the film that pleased him most.

> Harryhausen and producer Charles H. Schneer wanted to shoot the film in Greece, but they found the ruins there to be in too much of a state of decay, so filming was done in Italy.

> The animation model of the 100-foot tall Talos was actually twelve inches high. Ironically, although Harryhausen had strived for years to achieve a smooth motion with his animation, for Talos he had to make the movements intentionally stiff and mechanical since he is a bronze statue sprung to life.

> To give the impression of the animated Harpies physically interacting with the live-action footage of the blind Phineas, Harryhausen rigged several points of "contact" during the shooting in Italy. For example, the Harpies appear to push over a stone table that Phineas eats from--the table was rigged to topple on cue during filming and months later in his studio Harryhausen animated the Harpies (who were suspended from wires in front of a rear projection screen) "pushing" the table.

> For the Triton sequence, Harryhausen used a live actor on a miniature set of clashing rocks. The footage was filmed at "high-speed" so that the rocks and the water would appear huge in relation to the miniature model of the Argo.

> The model of the seven-headed Hydra was over three feet long, one of the largest models Harryhausen ever animated. Each of the seven heads had working mouths, tongues and blinking eyes and, as he was animating, Harryhausen had to remember which direction each head was moving!

> The climax of Jason and the Argonauts, and perhaps the single scene for which Harryhausen is best known, is the skeleton battle. Each skeleton model was eight to ten inches high; six of them were newly-constructed while the seventh was an older model that had already made an appearance in Harryhausen's first color fantasy film The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958). While animating seven skeletons fighting three men, Harryhausen sometimes had up to thirty-five animation movements to execute for each frame of film exposed. Some days he would only be able to complete 13 or 14 frames, which is less than a half-second of screen time. The entire sequence took Harryhausen four-and-a-half months to produce, resulting in just a few minutes of film... But what an incredible few minutes they are!

By John M. Miller