ENTERTAINMENT
May 7, 2013 | By Oliver Gettell
Over the course of his imaginative and painstaking career, the stop-motion animation wizard Ray Harryhausen created some of the most dazzling effects to grace the silver screen, and all without the benefit of computer-generated imagery. Following are but a few of Harryhausen's memorable creations. "Mighty Joe Young" (1949) As a teenage boy, Harryhausen had been awestruck by the original "King Kong," which was released in 1933, so the opportunity to work alongside that film's animation guru, Willis O'Brien, on another giant-ape movie was something of a dream come true.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
May 7, 2013 | By Dennis McLellan
Ray Harryhausen, a stop-motion animation pioneer who became a cult figure for creating special effects for “The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms,” “Jason and the Argonauts” and other science fiction and fantasy film classics, died Tuesday in London of natural causes. He was 92. His death was confirmed by Kenneth Kleinberg, his longtime legal representative in the United States. Harryhausen, a Los Angeles native who lived in London for more than four decades, inspired generations of filmmakers and special-effects artists.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
May 7, 2013 | By Dennis McLellan, Special to the Los Angeles Times
Ray Harryhausen, the stop-motion animation legend whose work on "The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms," "Jason and the Argonauts" and other science fiction and fantasy film classics made him a cult figure who inspired later generations of filmmakers and special-effects artists, has died. He was 92. Harryhausen died Tuesday in London, where he had lived for decades. His death was confirmed by Kenneth Kleinberg, his longtime legal representative in the United States. In the pre-computer-generated-imagery era in which he worked, Harryhausen used the painstaking process of making slight adjustments to the position of his three-dimensional, ball-and-socket-jointed scale models and then shooting them frame-by-frame to create the illusion of movement.
SCIENCE
May 1, 2013 | By Deborah Netburn, This post has been corrected. Please see note at bottom for details.
Talk about some tiny pixels: Researchers at IBM have created the world's tiniest stop-motion animation film by using single atoms to tell the story of a boy named Atom and his friend, an atom. The story is cute - Atom and his friend dance together, jump together, get separated and then reunite - but you will watch it in awe because each of the 242 frames has been magnified more than 100 million times, and what you are really seeing are scientists manipulating one of the squeensiest elements in the universe.
ENTERTAINMENT
March 20, 2013 | By Susan King, Los Angeles Times
In May 2005, DreamWorks Animation SKG and Aardman Animations announced that, following their collaborations on "Chicken Run," "Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit" and "Flushed Away," their next joint venture would be "Crood Awakening," a stop-motion comedy about a caveman living in a small village with a prehistoric genius. John Cleese of Monty Python fame and Kirk DeMicco ("Racing Stripes") were hired to write the script. And now nearly eight years later, a vastly different version of the tale is opening Friday.
BUSINESS
January 15, 2013 | By Richard Verrier, Los Angeles Times
When singer-songwriter Alicia Keys wanted to create an animated children's television series about the exploration of music, she turned to Burbank animation firm Bento Box for ideas. Bento's producers suggested an alternative: Instead of a TV show, how about an interactive storytelling app? That idea became "The Journals of Mama Mae and LeeLee," which was released through the iTunes store last fall for $3.99 and expands to Android mobile devices and tablets this month. Featuring original compositions from Keys, the animated series uses music, games, rewards and a journal to tell the story of a relationship between a young girl and a mystical grandmother.