Meeting my hero Harryhausen

As a child I loved the magical films that used 3-D animation technology, such as ‘The thief of Bagdad’, ‘The Golden Voyage of Sinbad’ and ‘Jason and the Argonauts’, and the name Ray Harryhausen became familiar to me as the person who created some of those wonderful characters. What a genius!

Fast forward a few years, and when I chose my career path I followed my head, not my heart and went to teacher training college as lots of my family had done. I studied maths rather than art, which I was advised to do as there were ‘lots more jobs for maths teachers – art teachers are two-a-penny!’. But I knew deep down that I didn’t really want to teach maths and so I switched course and left not really knowing what I wanted to do. I went along to my local art college to sign up to do some evening art classes and during the day started doing voluntary work in the art college crèche till I could decide what to do next. It was while I was attending those art classes that I met lots of helpful tutors who all had their connections in the industry, and one day, while I was up to my armpits in dirty nappies, one of them came down to give me a bit of paper with the telephone number of a small graphic design practice owned by an ex-student, who were looking for a ‘girl-Friday type person’ to start straight away. Needless to say, I put down the dirty nappy and ran to the college phone and got myself an interview the next week. I was lucky…no formal art qualifications, but they liked the BSc after my name, and gave me the job anyway.

Fast forward another few years, and now happily working amongst some very talented and creative people, the boss decided that we needed to put the Manchester design community on the map. So very boldly he contacted some of his design heroes and invited them to Manchester to give some talks on the aspects of the professions in which they all excelled. Amongst them were designers Seymour Chwast and Paula Scher from the US, and calligrapher Jean Larcher from Paris. The following year, the company we shared the premises with who made videos and did some broadcast work thought why not open it up to their profession, and so they in turn invited luminaries from the TV and film industry. Some of the invites were adventurous to say the least, and included Alex Cox and yes, can you believe it, Ray Harryhausen – but happy to come to Manchester he was and so I got to meet a childhood hero, one I would never have imagined I would when watching those films all those years ago. It was for one day and one night only, but he thrilled us with his stories, let us be photographed with some of his precious models, and even joined us for a meal in Chinatown in which he continued his stories that I’ll remember for the rest of my life.

Submitted by Anonymous

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