Willis O'Brien

Willis O'Brien was an American motion picture special effects and stop-motion animation pioneer. According to the ASIFA-Hollywood "was responsible for some of the best-known images in cinema history". He is best know for his work on The Lost World (1925), King Kong (1933) and Mighty Joe Young (1949), for which he won the 1950 Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.

During his early career, he spent his spare time sculpting and illustrating. This talent led him to being employed as a draftsman in an architects office and then as a sports cartoonist for the San Francisco Daily News.Following a new career as a boxer, he moved on to be a professional marble sculptor. During this time he made models of dinosaurs and a caravan which he animated with a local cameraman. San Francisco exhibitor Herman Wobber saw this 90-second test footage and commissioned O'Brien to make his first film, The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy (1915) for a budget of $5,000.

Ray Harryhausen worked alongside O'Brien in his production of 'Mighty Joe Young'. In this film O'Brien was the technical creator and was later awarded the Academy award for best visual effects in 1950. He then worked with Harryhausen again six years later for the famed dinosaur sequence in Irwin Allen's nature documentary 'The Animal World' in 1956.