Ray Harryhausen saw the movie King Kong at the age of 12, and it inspired him to become a stop motion artist. He was largely self-taught in his early years and received a great deal of encouragement from O'Brien. O'Brien hired Harryhausen as an animator for the movie Mighty Joe Young, the only big stop motion feature on which O'Brien and Harryhausen worked together. Eventually, Harryhausen struck out on his own to become one of the greatest independent stop motion visual effects artists in the history of cinema. Since he worked alone on low-budget films, he often did not have the resources for utilizing the methods of King Kong and Mighty Joe Young, which entailed large sets with glass paintings. In order to work within the tight confines of space and budget, Harryhausen devised a compositing method that revolutionized the art.
