Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan

Ray Harryhausen made monsters for films. His method was stop motion: move the puppet one frame, shoot, move it again. A single fight could take months. The skeleton fight in Jason and the Argonauts, the Medusa in Clash of the Titans, the dinosaurs in One Million Years B.C. all came out of his hands. The documentary talks to Harryhausen himself and includes test footage from his archive that had never been seen. And the directors who got into this work because of him talk as well. Gilles Penso directs; ninety minutes, with Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Peter Jackson, Guillermo del Toro, Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam and Nick Park among those speaking. Harryhausen died a year after the film, in 2013. The same work is done by computer now; what the documentary shows is the difference between that and something made by hand.