A Look at Special Effects Throughout History

In the beginning there were merely pictures, but not soon afterward people got bored with just looking at still images. That is when Alva Edison assigned his assistant, on his behalf, to invent something to record moving pictures (Rickitt 10). Out of that grew the Kinetoscope, which used a lantern to project a series of pictures (25-30 per second) through a lens which gave the illusion of movement (10). The Lumière brothers, of Paris, were then first to invent the Cinèmatographe (10). The Cinèmatographe would then project these images on a larger screen, like the projectors of today. The Lumières at first felt that their invention was just a craze but decided to try and use it for short-term financial gain (10). The brothers then gave the first public showing of films on December 28, 1885(10). One of the featured films was Train Arriving at a Station, which caused such an uproar because the audiences thought the train was going to jump off the screen towards them (10). The brothers then realized how powerful
Salem 2 their invention was and sent over two hundred agents to travel the world and exhibit their films (10). Thus starting the era of movies, which has shown no signs of stopping.
The first master of special effects was George Méliès. He used simple magic tricks to produce special effects which are still used today. He invented such things as double exposure and stop-action (Rickitt 13).
Double exposure is overlapping two images on a piece of film caused by running the film through a camera twice. The technique can be used to create in-camera dissolves or the appearance of transparent ghosts. Stop-action is a method of animating models by physically altering their position in between the photography of each frame. When the resulting images are projected at the normal speed, there is the illusion of autonomous movement (309).
The 1910's played an important part in special effects, for the first time people began to edit movies, use