Frame By Frame
rating: +18+x

Can you feel a story beginning? I can. Gods are made of stories, after all. There is a hero born. Not yet born, but the trace of such things is inevitable, really.

I lurch into being, a painful thing, for me. Divine flesh, lame and crippled. A contradiction at the heart of me. But one that I am used to. It is not a curse, it is not a weakness. It is simply what I am. I embrace it, endure it.

I am tempered by my lack. The imperfect maker of perfect things, there is a resonance to that, so it sticks.

The traces of the story are clear to me now, and I see the role I will play. The creator of a monster, of a towering man, cast in bronze.

The possibilities spin after that. In some, the guardian hides a princess, another of my father’s sometime lovers. In others, it protects an island from prying eyes. In yet another, I do not forge, but find it and reshape it to purpose.

Time spreads before me. Moments suspended apart, like scenes painted on a wall. Like all monsters, it is already fated to die at a hero's hand. I do not see exactly how, but I can follow the cast of the die.

It is contradictory, perhaps, to feel sorrow for a soulless automata. But it is my right, so I exercise it. I will make him mighty. If he cannot truly live, then he will echo, and through that, live on in the hearts of mortal men.

I heat the forge and set to work.


Ray Harryhausen is at a coffee shop with Cooper and Schneer. A stack of newspapers lies on the table between them. They’re filtering through them, looking at the review sections. His latest film has been an incredible success.

And it is his film. The 7th Voyage of Sinbad has actors, but he is the draw. So they come to him, when they are deciding what they want to conjure onto the screen for their next film. He has recently been reading, he explains, myths. Things that he dismissed as a child, in favour of the new wonders of cinema. Perhaps it is time to return to the oldest stories. His partners look at him sceptically. They aren’t sure that people will want to watch something that dusty.

That night, as he returns to his bed, he tosses and turns, and dreams of monsters. Of the gods that make them. He sees a man of cold fire stride across a bay like you or I would a puddle. He creaks and groans through the impossible motions of mechanical unlife. Filled with eerie purpose by a lame god that Ray cannot help but admire. Ray is a maker of things, and he feels a kinship with this fellow creator. In the delirium of REM, he knows that his creations are fated to die by a hero’s hand. But he will make them echo.

The next day, he proposes one of the classics. An ensemble of sorts. Jason and the Argonauts, he calls it.


There are three of us that I would call fire, I think. Easy to jump to Ares, or perhaps uncle Hades. The fires of war, or of Tartarus.

But no. They are not true fire. As I said, there are three of us who fully qualify.

My cousin, Prometheus, is a fire of promise, of passion. He is the forward thought, the part of us that exists not for now but for later.

I forged the chains that hold him to that rock.

Athena, dearest sister, is the fire of mind, of moments. A literal spark of genius, propagating the miracle of her birth amongst the mortal world.

But she does not create. She builds, but she does not create. There is a difference.

I am the fire of recollection, of remembrance. The fire that is ensconced in bronze and iron. There is a memory of fire in these things. Even when they are cold to the touch, divorced from the forge, you know that they were once molten. Coaxed from the earth by fire, shaped by fire, born of fire.

Talos will be cold. But he will still be fire.


Ray is in the workshop. He is often in the workshop.

Creating the models for Jason and the Argonauts takes Ray four months. It is a painstaking effort, beginning with commissioned armatures sent over to the studio. This is his forge, this is where he crafts Dynamation. He knows that the climactic scene, where Jason and his allies fend off seven skeletons, is what he will spend the most time on. He will spend more time with those models than he will people, over this production.

And yet. He finds himself drawn to him. To Talos. He picks up the armature, turning it over in his hands. A metal skeleton for a metal man, who, of course, is not really metal. As he begins to birth the monster, he overlays flesh of latex, enwrapping the wiry interior. It is an easy comparison to god, capital ‘G’ God. Moulding man from the clay of the modern world. But it’s not a fit. It doesn’t click. Talos isn’t alive. He is, or rather, he will be a simulation of life.

Ray has been voracious in his consumption of myth, in preparation for this film. He finds himself drawn, almost magnetically, to the crippled god of the forge. A fellow maker of things that ape life, but do not quite live it. It is that figure he keeps in mind, as Talos grows from indistinct silhouette to sharp reality. A metamorphosis from steel, plastic and glass to horror.


Talos is finished. He has been a mighty work, but it is one I am proud of. He is not a mirror of myself. It would be easy to draw on that sorrowful archetype. The crippled artist who paints that which he cannot have. I am not discontent, with who I am. It is why I embrace these words. Lame. Cripple. Oddity. They are indicators not of my weakness, but my will to endure.

That is what I reflect in him. Even now, knowing his fate. Knowing that he will fall, that his corpse will rust and shatter and become one with sand and stone. He will try. That is what matters, I think. And as I think it, it is happening. Time is not something I experience. Everything happens at once, in stories. It depends on who tells it. But there is something different here.

This story is not being told in Greece. It is not being told to anyone at all. It is a man in a room, alone with his creations. Flickering images on the screen play out a myth without monsters, and through clever perspective, a mastery of light, the man is filling the monsters in. Moving them himself, not like a puppeteer, but like the director at a play. He has made Talos. His own Talos. Twelve inches tall, but Talos nevertheless.

My heart pounds with pride, and I watch closely as Talos echoes.


Ray feels something in the room as he makes the adjustment. Dynamation is the definition of a painstaking process. Every frame, the recorded footage has to be perfectly synced with the movement of the model. There is no way for Ray to view the frames he has already completed. Inch by inch, micro-movement by micro-movement, the giant moves. And as he does it, he feels that presence in the room. Something greater than himself, but achingly familiar. There is warmth, but it is not hot, or painful. It is the warmth of memory, of the past.

He is in the cinema as a young man once more, watching a model of an ape climb a fake skyscraper. He knows that when this happened, he could not tear himself away. That this convinced him of the value of fantasy. But here, he can look around the room. At the terrified faces of shock and awe amongst his fellow moviegoers.

There’s a man next to him. Clubfooted, in a wheelchair that has been pushed into the aisle. His skin is olive, his hair dark, and his eyes burn with a subtle fire. He turns away from the film, a wry grin on his face, and meets Ray’s gaze.

He smiles. He nods, respectfully. And he turns his face back to the screen, back to Ray’s world.

Ray is back in the workshop, a cold sweat on his brow. The footage has rolled well past where it should be, as he did not pause it before his daydreaming. He will have to rewind it, remember where he was. He scratches his head, puzzled at what he saw, before continuing, engrossed in his merry act of creation.

That night, he will sleep, and see visions of crippled gods forging men of bronze.


When I was young, my father, who was a digital animator at the time, told me about Ray. I remember watching Sinbad, and Clash of the Titans. The animation in those films is outdated, by our standards. You can see the motion. The rough, handmade-ness of it. The way that the models and actors are clearly not in the same room. But there is a rough, simple charm to it. They aren’t meant to be real. You’re supposed to understand what went into making them, and appreciate that.

Talos changed that.

He revulsed and fascinated me. The creaking! There is something horrific about those sounds. About that unchanging visage, the relentless nature of the giant as he stalks his prey. When I went back to watch the films as an adult, I believed the effects would not hold up.

Why, then, on my fourth, fifth, sixth rewatch of Jason, does my spine still shiver when that metal man starts to move!? When he stalks those men through that island, when the sheer enormity of him picks up that boat like a toy and shakes them from it like ants?

I dream of bronze giants walking the shores of Greece, and in that moment, I am a child once more.


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