Willis obrien biography
- Willis Harold O'Brien (March 2, 1886 – November 8, 1962), known as Obie O'Brien, was an.
- Willis Harold O'Brien, known as Obie O'Brien, was an American motion picture special effects and stop-motion animation pioneer, who according to ASIFA-Hollywood "was responsible for some of the best-known.
- Willis O'Brien was the inventor of the 3D stop-motion animation technique used in the movies The Lost World (1925), King Kong (1933), and Mighty Joe Young .
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Willis O'Brien
The father of "stop-motion" animation, Willis O'Brien (1886-1962) was a Hollywood special effects innovator most famous for his work using miniature models of a gorilla in King Kong. O'Brien'spioneering efforts transformed the possibilities of filmmaking, inventing a new kind of visual language later exploited by others in movies such as Jaws and Alien.
Starting with his models in animated shorts and in the original dinosaur movie, 1925's The Lost World, O'Brien gave American filmmakers new latitude in creating monstrous fantasies. Although he won an Academy Award for the special effects in Mighty Joe Young in 1949, O'Brien labored largely in obscurity, gaining neither fame nor fortune. Many of O'Brien's fantastic, elaborate film ideas were never realized.
Conjurer of Movie Tricks
Born in Oakland, California, in 1886, Willis Harold O'Brien worked short stints as a cowboy and a boxer before becoming a cartoonist for the San Francisco Daily News. Soon, he grew interested in sculpting, making mostly small human or animal figures. In 1913, his
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Willis H. O'Brien
American special effects technician and animator
Willis O'Brien | |
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O'Brien in 1931 | |
| Born | Willis Harold O'Brien (1886-03-02)March 2, 1886 Oakland, California, U.S. |
| Died | November 8, 1962(1962-11-08) (aged 76) Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Resting place | Chapel of the Pines Crematory |
| Other names | "Obie" |
| Occupation(s) | Oscar Award winning Stop motionmodel animator |
| Years active | 1915–1962 |
| Spouse(s) | Hazel Ruth Collette (1925–1930; divorce) Darlyne Prenett (1934–1962; his death) |
| Children | 2 |
| Awards | Academy Award Best Visual Effects (1950); Winsor McCay Award (1997) |
Willis Harold O'Brien (March 2, 1886 – November 8, 1962), known as Obie O'Brien, was an American motion picture special effects and stop-motion animation pioneer, who according to ASIFA-Hollywood "was responsible for some of the best-known images in cinema history," and is best remembered for his work on The Lost World (1925), King Kong (1933), The Last Days of Pompeii (1935) and Mighty Joe Young (1949), for which he won the 1950 Ac
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Entry updated 23 May 2022. Tagged: Film, People.
(1886-1962) US special-effects supervisor in the Cinema industry. For his own amusement he early began to experiment with stop-motion photography. A one-minute home movie of an animated caveman and Dinosaur, involving 960 separate exposures, led to the producer and exhibitor Herman Wobber (1880-1965) advancing him $5000 to make a more elaborate version of the same subject: The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy (1915) ran for only five minutes but took two months to make. It proved successful and later in the same year O'Brien made a series of similar films for the Edison Company. In 1918 he made the more elaborate TheGhost of Slumber Mountain (1918), one of the first films to combine footage of live actors with animated models.
O'Brien's first full-length film was TheLost World (1925), whose success led him to start work on a project of epic proportions, «Creation», a variation on the Lost-World theme. It was never completed, but he incorporated much of its material – including impr
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