Minor Research: Ray Harryhausen
with my minor project focused on the mixing of live action, i have decided to base my methods on stop-motion pioneer ray harryhausen.
being mentored by willis o'brien, the man who made the effects for King Kong (1933), Ray would go on to perfect the art of stop motion and help inspire generations of film makers and visual effect creators with his own technique which he named "Dynamation", his methods of combinding stop motion elements with live action footage. This form of stop-motion helped him build a filmography from the early 40s all the way up to the 1980s with memorable films such as Jason and the argonaughts (1963) The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad (1958) and Clash Of The Titans (1981) And would go on to inspire a generation of filmakers such as steven speilberg, peter jackson and james cameron all name Ray harryhausen a reason why they went into the film industry, even being awarded with a Gordon E. Sawyer Award in 1992.
he had various methods on matching his stop motion with the live action footage, most commonly with filming the actors infront of a project much like willis o' brien with king Kong (1933). the same process is done with the creature and set peices in the foreground and the film of the live action in the background. What really helped sell these effects was the use of props and sets that ray could animate such as trampled cards, destructable buildings and crushable walls.
However for more complicated shots with having both the creature and an actor on set at the same time, there would be a way of splicing both the film reels together, and to have the creature or character to come from behind a building would be to have a clear peice of glass in between the camera and the armature and painted in black the area where the armature would be obscured. This can be seen be done in films like The Beast From 20,000 (1953) in which the beast can be seen walking past buildings down a street and then picking up a car obscured by a bus.
Translating these methods into a modern era of editing i can say that this the equivelent of adobe photoshop and/or various video editing software much like avid or adobe premeire. much like acting with a projector, a green screen can be used, the same with interacting with live actors and the armature. for the mixing of interacting behind live action obscuring the armature (much like the building and the beast) can be done with a mixture of photoshop and after effects.