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Stop Motion
Alfred Clark created what is commonly accepted as the first-ever motion picture special effect. While filming a reenactment of the beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots, Clark instructed an actor to step up to the block in Mary's costume. As the executioner brought the axe above his head, Clark stopped the camera, had all of the actors freeze, and had the person playing Mary step off the set. He placed a Mary dummy in the actor's place, restarted the camera. This way the executioner could cut off th -
Stop Trick Rediscovering
French magician Georges Méliès accidentally discovered the same "stop trick." According to Méliès, his camera jammed while filming a street scene in Paris. When he screened the film, he found that the "stop trick" had caused a truck to turn into a hearse, pedestrians to change direction, and men turn into women. Méliès, the stage manager at the Theatre Robert-Houdin, was inspired to develop a series of more than 500 short films, Because of his ability to seemingly manipulate and transform realit -
Matte Shot
The main innovations in special effects were the improvements on the matte shot by Norman Dawn. With the original matte shot, pieces of cardboard were placed to block the exposure of the film, which would be exposed later. -
Glass Shot
Dawn combined this technique with the "glass shot." Rather than using cardboard to block certain areas of the film exposure, Dawn simply painted certain areas black to prevent any light from exposing the film. From the partially exposed film, a single frame is then projected onto an easel, where the matte is then drawn. By creating the matte from an image directly from the film, it became incredibly easy to paint an image with proper respect to scale and perspective (the main flaw of the glass s -
Rear Projection
This method combined live-action foregrounds with pre-filmed background scenery. Actors perform in front of a translucent screen which has still or moving images projected on to it from behind and another camera films the composite image. These are then put together to create the completed image. -
Motion Picture Industry Improvements
Special effects techniques were improved and refined by the motion picture industry. Many techniques, such as the Schüfftan process were modifications of illusions from the theater (such as pepper’s) and still photography (such as double exposure and matte compositing). Rear projection was a refinement of the use of painted backgrounds in the theater, substituting moving pictures to create moving backgrounds. Life casting of faces was imported from traditional mask making. Along with makeup adva -
Optical Printer
An important innovation in special-effects photography was the development of the optical printer. Essentially, an optical printer is a projector aiming into a camera lens, and it was developed to make copies of films for distribution. Until Linwood G. Dunn refined the design and use of the optical printer, effects shots were accomplished as in-camera effects. Dunn demonstrating that it could be used to combine images in novel ways and create new illusions. One early showcase for Dunn was Orson -
Stop Motion Development
Several techniques soon developed, such as the "stop trick", wholly original to motion pictures. Animation, creating the illusion of motion, was accomplished with drawings (most notably by Winsor McCay in Gertie the Dinosaur) and with three-dimensional models (most notably by Willis O'Brien in The Lost World and King Kong). Many studios established in-house "special effects" departments, which were responsible for nearly all optical and mechanical aspects of motion-picture trickery. -
Miniatures
The challenge of simulating spectacle in motion encouraged the development of the use of miniatures. Naval battles could be depicted with models in studio. Tanks and airplanes could be flown (and crashed) without risk of life and limb. Most impressively, miniatures and matte paintings could be used to depict worlds that never existed. Fritz Lang's film Metropolis was an early special effects spectacular, with innovative use of miniatures, matte paintings, the Schüfftan process, and complex -
Cloud Tank
The cloud tank technique was first used in the movie "The Beginning or the End" to re-create the explosion of the atom bomb. This effect uses a glass tank filled with saline solutions of various densitites and is used to film billowing cloud formations. Similar methods have also been used to create billowing cloud formations in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "Ghostbusters." -
Motion Control
This Technique was a huge step forward in filmmaking. Until this point in cinema history, successful combination of separately filmed elements was traditionally dependent on ensuring that there was no movement in any of the cameras used to film the various components. O.L. Dupy changed all this with the invention of the Dupy Duplicator which recorded the movement of a camera and reproduced it wherever and whenever different elements of a composite shot filmed, and effectively combined later. -
Dykstraflex
George Lucas's Star Wars ushered in an era of science-fiction films with expensive and impressive special-effects. Effects supervisor John Dykstra, A.S.C. and crew developed many improvements in existing effects technology. They developed a computer-controlled camera rig called the "Dykstraflex" that allowed precise repeatability of camera motion, greatly facilitating travelling-matte compositing. Degradation of film images during compositing was minimized by other innovations: the Dykstraflex -
3D Computer Graphics in a Composite
For the first time in history a 3D computer generated image was successfully placed into a film background. The company that achieved this was ILM and the film they did it for was "Young Sherlock Holmes." -
Life Action 3D
The release of James Camerons' "Avatar" marked the film industry's introduction into true 3-D. Before, 3-D was only thought to be a movie gimmick, but Cameron designed dual-function cameras that simultaneously filmed in both conventional 2-D and state of the art 3-D. The result was nothing short of amazing and has led to the 3-D craze we now see with movies
