On the basis of this stop motion short O’Brien was hired on at the Thomas Edison studios where he worked on a series of stop motion shorts – all with a prehistoric theme – and started conceiving of ways to combine the animated models with live action actors. (I think the title was longer than the movie, by the way). Based on the 90 seconds of test footage he was hired by San Francisco film exhibitor Herman Wobber to make a short for him called The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy. He started doing crude animation of the models on film around 1913. He had always been interested in dinosaurs, and made some models as a hobby. Willis O’Brien was born in Oakland California, and held many odd jobs in his young adulthood. The basics of how stop motion animation is achieved. In my reading, I discovered that the man who had created those effects for King Kong was Willis O’Brien, known as Obie to his friends.
My imagination was captured by this method of bringing giant beasts to life in movies. Repeat until you have an entire sequence that when projected seems to show the model moving in uninterrupted – if slightly jerky – motion. Then the model is manipulated slightly into a new position, and another frame of film is clicked off. In the film production phase small models are positioned on miniature sets. I was then boggled to learn that Kong was an 18 INCH tall metal armature covered in rabbit fur – and that his movement was a trick using persistence of vision – a term for the effect that when your eye is presented with two pictures with slight differences of position projected at 24 frames (or pictures) a second – your brain will process the two pictures as movement. But I needed to know – even at that young age – just how these special effects were achieved. The wondrous special effects – depicting dinosaurs and a 50 foot tall ape interacting with a crew of documentary filmmakers on a legendary island in a far flung corner of the world – are some of the most visually interesting and charming visuals I’d seen up to that time (admittedly not a lot of time as I was still in single digits when I took in my first viewing). That is a definitive example of movie magic – and it had the same effect on a lot of kids at the time. Back in the day as a kid I was blown away watching the original King Kong (1933).
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