Mondo Knows Facts

King Kong was animated one frame at a time

Willis O'Brien posed a jointed model and shot single frames of each pose For the 1933 film, Willis O'Brien built a metal armature covered in rubber and fur, moved it a fraction between exposures and photographed single frames. When the film ran at normal speed the model appeared to move. A single second of screen time could take hours of work. It sits in Mondo's movies & tv collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.

Where this comes from

Science and Media Museum

Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.

Go further

More facts like this

Tags: stop-motion, 1933, special-effects

King Kong was animated one frame at a time: the short answers

Where does this come from, and can I check it?
Willis O'Brien posed a jointed model and shot single frames of each pose. The figure is taken from Science and Media Museum, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
Is this really a movies & tv fact?
Yes. It sits on the Movies & TV shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
What else can I read about it?
The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.