VHS scenes of skeleton fight on DVD
On my copy of the DVD, most but not all of the skeleton fight near the end appears to be a VHS transfer, as it has a much less defined appearance. Is this correct?
No, they would have telecined it to disc from the film print. The sporadically less defined look is, I am sure, attributable to the fact that the effectiveness of the composited footage can vary considerably from scene to scene. In this case, the rear projected live-action footage of Kerwin Mathews on set swinging his sword at nothing looks somewhat grainy, even though Ray Harryhausen did his best to make it appear as if the sword of the animated skeleton on the miniature set was actually making contact with Sinbad’s. Still, as a huge fan of Ray’s films, it still amazes me what he was able to accomplish. For example, earlier in the film, when Harufa is being roasted on the spit by the Cyclops, consider how sharp the image of the monster is: the matte line is quite thin. However, this was far less complex than the fights between monsters and men, since the actor was simply photographed against a blue screen, and no miniature rear screen projection was called for. In “The 3 Worlds of Gulliver," instead of using the blue screen process, Ray used the sodium screen process (favoured by Disney), and this yielded a much sharper composited image.
share