Take Harryhausen skeletons for example. They film the actors and the skeletons, but how did they put them onto one bit of film? Surely someone didn’t have to cut out a skeleton from each frame and stick them on?
Likewise, how did they add matt paintings to the film?
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A lot of times the matte would be brought to set and set up in front of the camera so it was covering that part of the frame and the effect was just done live. Another way to do this is that, if you cover part of the camera with black, that part of the frame won’t be exposed and you can expose it to something else later.
For Jason and the Argonauts, the skeletons were stop motion animated. So they had these small models of the skeletons that they moved one frame at a time and snapped a picture. To mix it with the humans, they had a projector behind the model stage where they were showing the live action footage and they would move it one frame at a time as they were moving the models. And this can be a very intricate process. If you had an actors sword hit a skeleton’s sword, they would get a little extra piece of the sword for the stop motion to cover the gap.
This video does a good job explaining some of the details. https://youtu.be/eO0Di-Iczuo
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