Ray Harryhausen Documentary - Takeaways

From watching the documentary on Ray Harryhausen I have been deeply inspired by his outstanding work. Through watching the documentary, I have noted down takeaways which relate to my own interests and aspirations.

The first point that was very intriguing to me was how experimental Ray Harryhausen was throughout his career. Back in the time where stop motion films were almost non-existent getting people to create the models, move the figures, take pictures of them and draw storyboards of each scene was incredibly rare. Even getting the people who did these things was still a challenge to get them interested in a stop-motion project as it was a huge risk of whether this would flop or become successful. This is why Harryhausen decided to do a lot of this himself, with the help of his parents making the models. This personally inspires me a lot as it shows that with some experimenting and learning you can get yourself far ahead in the media industry.

Another takeaway I gathered from the documentary was how open everybody was to be inspired by Harryhausen. From my personal experience, being inspired by someone for your own work is looked-down upon since you’re taking their creativity in a sense, but you can see in this documentary that Harryhausen is happy to be part of people’s inspirations and loves how people have taken Harryhausen’s techniques and manipulated them into their own projects. This personally makes me feel more comfortable about being inspired from other people and that it’s completely normal in the animation industry to be.

The last point which inspired me the most was how Harryhausen was mentioning the importance of music in these films as he describes it as being such an essential and that he would sometimes use the music to animate his characters. To me, music is incredibly underrated as sometimes a good soundtrack is all you need to make the scene admirable.