Ray HarryHausen

On Gwangi

Aside | | Paul Greer


Amongst the methonal fumes, corduroy flares and taste of cresta in the pre-star wars seventies there was relatively little of the fantastic to occupy the day dreaming mind of the under 10s. There was occasional Saturday morning Godzilla, there was Flash Gordon and various other assorted grand ideas fitting into a budget.

Valley of Gwangi crashed into my world during this time. At Gran’s house, A creepy pre title, the very western theme music with crashing timpani (by Jerome Morross of Big Country (not that one that one), the promise of cowboys vs dinosaurs. A playfulness of genre unusual until the age when comic books finally took over cinema.

Gwangi was conceived by Willis O’Brien, prime animator of the original King Kong. It was Part of a set of ideas featuring Cowboys and monsters (including Mighty Joe Young and the xxxxx). O’Brien was unable to finish the project and handed it to his apprentice, Ray Harryhausen, who had by then completed many multi creature films which were mostly better t.

The Allosaurus in gwangi was fast moving, tail constantly curling, in a candid moment it scratched it’s nose. It was alive. Many books at that time were still telling us that dinosaurs were sluggish, slow moving cold blooded creatures. But Harryhuasen looked at them with the eye of an animator, seeing how they neeed to move. Consequently he was ahead of many paleantologists and he produced a level of dynamism unmatched until Speilberg got his hands in the Train Set 23 years later.

Showing my children a film such as this is a recipe for heartbreak. They’re raised on hi end 21st century cgi, it’s meaning is lost to them because they don’t get the history and it’s just too old. Sometimes it’s equally devastating revisiting a treasure of childhood, one sees the flaws not perceived at such a young age. Gwangi carries some of that, yet the magic still carries me away.

I had the privilege of meeting Harryhausen about twenty years ago. I managed to mumble about how much I loved the film and had gone through the lasso sequence frame by frame enough times to degrade a VHS. He smiled and told me the story of how they had taken a jeep with a pole, the stunt riders lassoed the pole and the jeep accelerated back and forth pulling the riders off the horses, and then by the “magic of cinema” (his words) they removed the pole and put Gwangi in. I nodded gratefully and crawled back under my stone.

As mentioned The Valley of Gwangi is being shown as an open air screening in  Victoria Square, Bedminster, Bristol on August 8th as part of the Bristol Bad Film Club (wtf?) (oh wait, they apologise). I am unable to attend and have nothing but cold, hard envy for all of you who can.

General Items of Interest.

| Paul Greer

Yes, so I’m still working out what this thing is, I make and think a lot of things and it occurred to me that most of it was either spread out all over the internet on social media sites or scribbled in notebooks never to be see.

I generally won’t be writing about what I am working on at BDH as we have a general policy of not speaking of such things until they are done, for reasons which should be obvious.

I subscribe to several TinyLetters which are lovely because they come across like personal correspondence, so I am going to treat this like that, a letter to an old friend (that’s you by the way), keeping them up to date. But I will keep plugging at this even though I am probably 10 years too late. ( a really good Tiny Letter, by the way is Pocket Lint by the aforementionerd Mary Hamilton, it’s a collection of interesting stuff she finds on t’internet).

I also should point out that these “daybook” posts will probably be a compilation of things stumbled across, written about or mentioned already elsewhere, but the writing things down seems to be suiting me, it’s making cogs turn upstairs, so I will endeovour to press ahead. Having a phone that I can type quite quickly on makes this a lot more feasable, as my time is usually limited.

Twitter started accepting GIF’s although they don’t seem to trigger automatically at the moment. like they would on Tumblr, a lot of the attraction of them for me wat it was a potential short film with no play button, the viwer had watched it as soon as they had looked at it, the play button turns it back into a request thing, but it still good I think. Surprising how old peices of tech just seem to hang in there and gain whole new realms of life in their own way.

There’s this clip of Phil Tippets Stop Motion pre-vis for the kitchen sequence for Jurassic Park (via mappeal).  Some of it much more compelling than the final result methinks, but I am old fashioned.

An old animation friend suggested it was better than Harryhausen but I am not sure I am willing to accept that.

(The acting is better though)

 

Molly Broxton is starting a small press called We Are Hermits. I am working on a little something for the first edition (I can tell you about that because it’s art not work, see?). You can sign up for occasional email updates here.

Did you see the Supermoon?

There were a couple of game announcements at E3 that really caught my attention. One was something called No Man’s Sky, its was made by a small company called, and they made a game that generates procedural worlds for you to explore. Here’s a presentation movie:

And then animation supremo David O’Reilly announced his game Mountain.

“Mountain is a mountain simulator, You play as a mountain, and you get to do all of the things that a mountain does. I’m sure that fulfills all of your darkest and most disgusting fantasies.”

And watch this trailer for Mari Naomi’s book Dragon’s Breath and Other True Stories, it’s simple, but awesome:

Ok, that’s it. I could keep going but I need to wash potatoes.