Ruth Whiter: Do you think it can be distracting?

Ray: It can be, but then you accept it because it's a puppet film. If you did that on Medusa it wouldn't be acceptable, it would just look like bad animation.

The Business Of Animating
Ray talked about a trip he had made a few years ago, when he'd visited Will Vinton's studios in Portland, Oregon, and also met with two paleontologists who had originally been inspired by his dinosaur films. He talked about joining them for a dig and the amount of patience needed for that type of work, which led us to talking about the commonly held view that animators need an unusual amount of patience.

Ray: A lot of people thought my work was very tedious, and it can be if you look at it from that point of view, but I never looked upon it as tedious.

Ruth: People come into the studio and the first thing they always say is, "Oh, you must be so patient," and I think, there are so many jobs in this world where you're working on a tiny part of a whole, animation is just one of them, and what they really mean is, "I couldn't be bothered to do it myself."

Ray: They don't know the joy of seeing the film come back and what you had in your mind is on film.

Ruth: The only thing I find tedious is something with no character, like making a plane fly around in the air, but otherwise it would never occur to me that it was.

Ray: No, that's the same for me. I did find parts tedious, when I had to do things because they had to bridge something. I was very limited in what I could do with flying saucers, because they're just a metal disc. I had to try and put character in as if they were intelligently guided. Did you ever see that, Earth vs. The Flying Saucers? We destroyed Washington DC. That's not the reason I fled to Europe.

In fact, Ray saw the live-action shoot as more demanding of patience:

Ray: That's why I never became a director. I never had patience with people. My characters always did exactly what I told them to do.

Roger: That was one of our questions, actually, why didn't you just direct the whole film.

Ray: I'd like to have, but I thought something would suffer, the animation or the rest of it. Many times I felt like I'd do better than what the director did, but some of them got a little discouraged because they didn't have full charge of making the film, and sometimes there'd be battles of egos. We always had to lay out our films very carefully, because they were always made on a tight budget. Charles would always keep a tight reign on the live-action, and I did all the animation, and all the construction of the puppets. Sometimes I had other people model them, but I would in the end make the final puppet myself. When I started out, I couldn't find another kindred soul, and if you wanted something you couldn't just go out and find somebody who'd do it, so I had to learn to do it myself. I took courses at USC in film editing and art direction and photography when I was still in high school.

Roger: What did you do about foam casting?

Ray: I learned to do that with the Dunlop material. I cast most of them myself. I sometimes had people model the actual figure because the texture takes so much time. I sometimes had the staff sculptors do figures based on my drawings.

Roger: And who did the mechanics; who did the armatures?

Ray: I had the ball and sockets made, different sizes, and then I put them together to fit my particular needs. But I had to learn to do everything because I couldn't find another kindred soul. Now you see eighty people listed doing the same things I was doing by myself.

Ruth: You said recently that one of the reasons you retired was that you'd spent long enough working alone in dark rooms...

Ray: Yes, I got rather tired of that after a while.

Whereas Harryhausen worked virtually alone, current stop-motion productions like The PJs use many artists to bring their characters to life. © Will Vinton Studios.

Ruth: Were you literally alone? The way I know stop-motion studios to work is that there will be lots of other people setting up your shot, and then you're on your own while you animate, but at least you see people throughout the day. Were you literally setting your own camera, your own lights, and your own rigging?

Ray: The only person I had with me was an electrician, to be sure the lights didn't blow out without my noticing. But I actually set the lights, I did my own camera work, my own animation, and my own sets. I did everything -- except on the last film, I had to bring in other animators because we got behind, we had a technical problem.