Ray Harryhausen was originally inspired by Willis O'Brien the animator who created Puppetoons. He would create both large and small scale models and their sets in order to film his scenes. He developed his own technique of split background which enabled him to create the live action animations by blacking out first the foreground and then the background and sandwiching his animations in between.
His producer/partner Charles Schneer came up with the word Dynamation as a merchandising term alternating it with SuperDynaMation and Dynarama for other films and these terms can be seen on some of the old movie posters.
