Sets & Props
None of the original sets for the film were saved, and had to be painstakingly recreated to match the ones in the existing footage. Details such as texture on trees and mechanical features such as the windmill in the final scene were built from scratch in Walsh and Caballero's garage shop. Harryhausen remarks "They kept the style that I had developed over the years very well. I remember in the 1950s I had my father take me to the desert to find plants that had miniature leaves that looked like small trees. Mark and Seamus traveled to the (Mojave) desert for the same type of plants to use in the new sets."


More than a dozen heads with different expressions were created for each character.
Animation
Once sets and puppets were created, Walsh and Caballero made video animatics or "pop-throughs" of each scene. These contained keyframe animation and layout based on Ray Harryhausen's storyboards. Videos were sent to Ray in London, for him to review and comment on. In order to accurately match Harryhausen's animation technique, Mark and Seamus used an Animation Toolworks Video Lunchbox frame-grabber to analyze the movements one frame at a time. Walsh describes the process, "We tried our hardest to match his style of animation. Everyone has their own way of animating, and to try to match someone's style is like trying to match their signature." Just like in the other fairy tale films, in-camera, eight-frame dissolves were used to change facial expressions from one plaster head to another. The puppets' feet were attached to the set with small screws or "tie-downs" for each step. On trips to Los Angeles, Harryhausen worked with Walsh and Caballero to develop each shot, and he animated several new shots on his own. Caballero recalls Harryhausen's surprising speed; "Ray works very quickly, he went into the garage, animated the shot, and finished a lot sooner than we expected. He is still a master animator." He did not use a video frame-grabber. "I was raised on the old Willis O'Brien method--just do it and wait 'til the next day to see the rushes. I don't care where I've been… I want to know where I'm going." Harryhausen says, joking, "I think we all have a Frankenstein complex-we want to inject life into inanimate objects!" Caballero explains the attraction to stop-motion animation they all share, "You are handling the puppet and feeling the emotion of the character. The tangibility of stop-motion gives it this charm that you don't feel with any other form of animation."
Cinematography
Almost all of the new footage was shot on the same Cine Special 16mm camera that Harryhausen used in the 1950s.The Kodachrome film stock he used, however, was no longer in production, so at Kodak's suggestion, they opted for Kodak 7274, a vision stock. "It has a lot of latitude so we were able to play around with it to try to make it look like the Kodachrome," says Walsh. A second Cine Special camera belonging to the late visual effects animator, David Allen, was used for secondary shots. Also used was a 16mm Mitchell camera for some of the more elaborate in-camera effects.

After 22 years in
retirement, Ray steps in
to animate a few scenes-
Still the master of
stop-motion!