My tribute to Ray Harryhausen

I know it's a tad late, but here's my tribute to Ray Harryhausen, who passed away last year at 92. He was very influential on my career, so here's my tribute.

While I was a huge fan of dinosaurs, I never really knew who Ray was. Frankly, I wasn't sure there really were too many dinosaur films out there. I recently came into a fascination with Greek Myth, so mom rented Clash of the Titans and Jason and the Argonauts on Netflix. Coming from an era of CGI, I was a tad jaded, but, frankly, his creatures Medusa and Talos were some of the few monsters to ever scare me. They didn't even need to explode out of a doorway, screaming at the top of their lungs, the sheer mood and movement of the creatures genuinely creeped me out. This is coming from a kid who forced his Grandma to play Jurassic Park 3 every Friday, a film where Velociraptors pin down mercenaries and split open their skulls with their claws. A few years later, after a bit of research on the subject, I came across Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger on television. The death of Trog and the Saber-Toothed Tiger affected me more than any monsters death, even more than the original Godzilla.

Well, I didn't hear much about him until my old teacher put on a video on about him. I think that's when I was certain I wanted to make stop motion dinosaurs and animate them. I already had a stop motion program I got years before, but that video made me certain about what I wanted
 to do. I went through many trials and tribulations, from baked sculpey creatures, to pipe cleaner plesiosaurs, to plasticine Godzillas, to Patchy, to Malcolm, to O'bie, to Ray (get it?) . I eventually was able to buy the Beast from 20,000 fathoms, a beautiful movie with a fantastic monster, a combination of Ray Bradbury's short story and Ray Harryhausen's concepts. I also was able to record a strain of Harryhausen movies, and git to watch 20 million miles to Earth, First Men in the moon, and Earth vs the Flying Saucers. It was awesome.

When one of my teachers who also loved his work broke the news, it was terribly sad. But I'm happy to know that people still care about his craft and continue it to this day. Richard Svensson's working on his Lovecraft Projects, Phil Tippet's making MAD GOD,  ML Tharme is working on Wildlife on Mars, Peter Jackson recreated the Spider Pit sequence from the original KING KONG, and I'm working on MUCH TO FEAR ABOUT SUMMER.

His work inspired all of us. Thank you, Ray Harryhausen.

THE TERRIBLE BEAST OF HUEVALMAN'S SQUARE

This is unrelated to my movie, this is just a short story I wrote for a creepy victorian era short story competition. Enjoy!

THE TERRIBLE BEAST OF HUEVELMAN’S SQUARE

Kelston Hubler

I desperately hope I am simply a madman. Nothing more than a complete lunatic rambling on in a musty concrete room in the psychiatric ward. Yes, a sane, reasonable man like me has been driven to begging for the greatest dream of pure nonsense. If anyone aside from me is reading this, a story even I won't read, I am probably dead, or being laughed at as I ramble insane nonsense behind a thick concrete wall. Here is the story, as it was, up to now.

I lived in London, in 1857. It's a musty town, with people and horses strolling up and down the muddy wet concrete roads, surrounded on all sides by crumbling brick facades crammed with crying families and starving workers. The crammed alleyways hide gypsies and circus travelers intent on selling you chicken heads and voodoo nonsense, as well as deranged serial killers who prowl the foggy night alleys, looking for women to decapitate for their own sick pleasure, immortalized in the Penny Dreadfuls you can occasionally buy if your boss gives you a raise. It's a crowded, murky, industrialized town, but no one cares, just going about their everyday business like ants in the dirt. I live on the third apartment in a crowded brick complex simply known as "the brick house", on Huevalmans square. The building sits on the corner of a crossway, with endless streams of traffic noisily bumping into each other the entire cloudy day, until night, when the fog sets in and everybody flees the streets to avoid murderers. I came from a small moor side farm near Exmoor. My uncle invited me to live in the city as his secretary for his small boat making industry he does as the docks. One day, I watched from my musty window, looking down at the dimming streets. The people began to drain into houses, the horsemen driving as far away from the streets as possible. The gypsies and circus men slid into empty wooden crates in the alley. Then the fog set in. Everything below my apartment was gray clouds, seeping through the streets, like that octopus in those cartoons my mother sends me from America. She finds political cartoons funny. I look on, staring at the tin shack roofs, when I saw it. At first, I assumed it was a man, rising above the flat tops of an apartment complex. Then, I noticed it was much bigger. It looked much like a lizard, if a lizard was as big as two burly Irishmen. It had a long snout and a triangular flat head. It opened it's jaws, making an ear-splitting howl. It suddenly ran towards my complex, and jumped off the building. I reeled in shock as it disappeared into the fog. For two minutes, nothing happened. I soaked in what I just saw, and how impossible it was. Was it some sort of phantasm? Then it's foot hit the window. I fell back, being caught by a wooden chair. It's foot was like a cat, if the cat's skin was grey and the cat was shaved. The creature's head reared up into the window, hissing. It's solid black eyes were broken by red slits, staring at me. Looking deeper into them, I swear I saw that the slits were cracks in the gates of hell, oozing blood-colored fire and blasphemous demons of latin grimoires. It's right paw rose up to the window, banging it violently. The glass began to crack. The creature was like a ghost of a prehistoric beast from hell! I began to lose it. In the back of my mind, long lost memories of man's ancestry of worshiping and fearing primal demons and gods flooded into my modern brain. I rapidly shot my hand into the desk, yanking out a chalk, and I began to scribble ancient, cursed symbols written by the high priests of the celtics and Egyptians, muttering ancient profanities that would make a church priest faint. The ancient demon stopped banging. In my ritualistic trance, I forced my eyes to look up at the horrifying beast in the window. It's scaly lips moved like writhing animals on the operating table of a mad doctor, emitting ancient Egyptian curses in a booming voice. It jumped off the window, vanishing into the fog. My body stopped giving me back control. I ran to. The window. The creature was gone. I sat back in relief, thinking it must have been a hallucination, until I heard a man's scream. The creature jumped up onto the opposite building, a screaming man in it's jaws, confirming any hope I had of sanity. Then it jumped back into the fog, disappearing.

I didn't sleep that night. I was too busy huddling in my protective pagan symbols on the wooden floor, shivering in fear, looking at the window to wait for the monster's next move. It never did. The next day I read of a man disappearing, with a picture matching the man in the monster's jaws. That day, I started my search to find out what I saw. I was no longer rational, I was like a wide eyed child, listening to every gypsy in the alley way I interviewed, every Cultist in the sewers, believing everything they said. I always retreated to the safety of my apartment every night, boarding up the window with planks from my uncle's factory, hiding under my bed. Every night there was knocking, for exactly one minute, then it stopped. The cultists and gypsies said the monster was Grakkyth, a monster from another world. They said the smog was angering the gods, and the smog was used as a river of sorts by demons like Grakkyth, swimming from their world to ours. Then, one day, passing a park, I saw an enormous statue of a giant lizard, which looked exactly like Grakkyth! The creator of the statues said they were animals from the Stone Age, long before man. Could Grakkyth be a descendant of one of these beasts? I would occasionally gather strength to peel back the boards, to find out what was knocking. I would see the animal slithering over the rooftops like a snake, even though it clearly had legs. When the beast slithered close to me, the board would force itself shut, unable to be peeled up for days.

As a write, my fear has driven me home, after a whole month of this hell. I have reeled in horror to find the pagan symbols protecting me had been swept away by the manager! The fog is setting in, and I'm trapped. I rush for the door, but it's locked itself. Oh god. I cannot find any chalk or drawing utensils in the drawer. No, my hands are bleeding! The board, it's peeling away like paper, crumbling to dust. The glass is broken! IT'S INSI-

MY LIFE AS A STOP-MOTION ANIMATOR, PART 2

Eventually, after all my clay expierments, I realized that clay wasn't exactly the best animation method.
It would melt in heat, it couldn't walk properly, and it wasn't permamnent. So, I began to research how the professionals like Ray Harryhausen or Willis O'brien make models. Unfortunately, while the instructions were online, they seemed way too hard and dangerous for me to try, so I decided to try to make it my own way. After much trial and error, I finally created my first stop motion model, a tyrannosaurus named patchy. He was incredibly crude, with a bionicle armature, model magic flesh and fabric skin. Patchy had to go through tons of revisions, often tearing out whole limbs and replacing them. Patchy got his name from his skin, crudely stitched together fabric.















I put him through many tests, realizing that the way he was made wouldn't allow him to do stop motion for too long. His plastic joints were wearing, causing his heavy body to lean forward, and his feet had no holes to bolt him down to the board. So, I had to put him in storage, and work for a better design...















Next up was Malcolm, my Utahraptor. Completely abandoning fabric, I coated a bionicle armature with a kind of clay I bought on amazon that was supposed to be flexible when dry. Sadly, it didn't work, so even though Malcolm had a great design, he can barely move without cracking. At last, I knew I had to resort to the old fashioned way. Using every bit of knowledge I had on the subject, a box of erector set parts, and a constant stream of liquid latex and air conditioning foam from amnazon, I created O'bie, who, to my relief, worked perfectly fine.

Today, my craft is much more advanced, but I'm glad I still have these models in my possession.

MY LIFE AS AN ANIMATOR: EARLY CLAY PROJECTS

 Hello,
I'm going to tell you about my life as animator.

Ever since I heard of it, stop motion has been a process I've always wanted to try. My first projects, in which baked sculpey animals run around on a paper set, are sadly lost, due to my first computer crashing, but I have been able to recover some early experiments in plasticine, a kind of clay that doesn't dry out. I used it to make some crude animation, like this blob creature, inspired by the "Bolero" sequence of the animated feature "Allegro non Troppo" I saw on youtube. Trust me, it was less jerky on my computer.

And this T-rex eating a ornithomimus, on an unfinished film about the bone wars:

INTRO

Hello, Fellow Hominids!

I'm Kelston, and here I will document my hobby of writing short stories and making stop motion dinosaurs.

Since I was a kid, I've always enjoyed dinosaurs, and the ways they've been interpreted on screen. And when I discovered stop motion, well, I could now make the monsters of my mind on both paper and film.

Currently, I'm working on a film project inspired by the writings of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Ray Bradbury. It's very challenging, with limited resources, but I believe I can push on.

So, enjoy my blog!

-Kelston