A Brief History of Movie Special Effects

Jason and the Argonauts — Stop Motion
In 1963's Jason and the Argonauts, a pack of lethal skeletons rise from the ground for one heck of a heart-pounding skirmish. The dueling bones were achieved by stop-motion photography, which uses realistic puppets or models that are manipulated and photographed one frame at a time. First used in the late 1890s, stop motion was one of the earliest animation techniques. Notable uses of stop motion include 1933's King Kong, the claymation TV explosion of the 1960s and The Empire Strikes Back (1980), in which the franchise's snow-hardy AT-AT walkers were filmed in stop motion using miniatures and matte paintings.

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