Wills O'Brien

Wills O'Brien

The father of "stop-motion" animation, Willis O'Brien (born in 1886 died in 1962) was a Hollywood special effects innovator known for his work using small models of a gorilla in "King Kong". O'Brien's pioneering efforts transformed the possibilities of film making, inventing a new kind of visual language later exploited by others in movies such as "Jaws" and "Alien"

One day, while making models with his friend, an idea was born. Young O'bie recognized that he could animate the models on the same kind of way that cartoonists used to animate drawings: by building a model and then moving it's parts one frame of film at a time, he could give the models cinematic life. Though this process of stop-motion animation had been invented and used already