The two brothers, Stacy and Horace Woodard, cooperated in every aspect of the making of the "Struggle to Live" series of one-reel films, produced for
Educational Pictures and distributed by
Fox Film Corporation (
Struggle for Life,
Life in the Deep,
Born to Die, and
Man, the Enigma), sharing the producing, writing, photographing, directing, and editing. These pictures displayed the masterly use of the microscopic camera, devised by Stacy Woodard, a huge apparatus weighing two tons, erected in the garage of its inventor's Santa Monica home. In one film, massed regiments of ants were seen assailing entrenched termites; a second recorded the fights between desert insects and animals; a third,
City of Wax, showed the life of the bee. However, Woodard has since been criticized for staging unnatural insect battles by forcing the creatures together in very small spaces. Stacy Woodard, the elder of the two brothers by two years, photographed
The River (1938), the under-sea portion of
Samarang (1933) and the whaling portion of
I Conquer the Sea. The brothers shared two Academy awards for their short pictures,
City of Wax (1934) and
The Sea. The entire expedition that went to Mexico to make
The Adventures of Chico (1938), the story of a small Mexican boy and his animal friends, consisted of Stacy and Horace Woodard and two cameras with lenses, reflectors and reels of negative.
Amadee J. Van Beuren co-produced some of the Woodard brothers' nature films, and hired the two men to edit
Frank Buck's film
Fang and Claw. ==Later years and death==