Directly On Film Effects
Motion pictures are a special visual effect themselves. The first motion pictures from kinetoscopes in 1890s of just people bowing or moving around spawned what we now know as movies and television. In the 1880s, French scientist Charles-Emile Reynaud created the Theatre Optique, which projected a series of images onto a screen. In 1892, he showed off his creation in front of an audience with three animated short films that were created by painting the scenes directly onto the film frames.
Creating effects directly on the film by scratching off the emulsion and painting is a technique that continued to be used years later. It is commonly called drawn-on animation and can also be referred to as camera-less animation.
This technique can also be used for making lightning bolts on existing footage. Painting on films has been used to colorize many silent films.
For more information on the hand-painting technique, this article is a comprehensive read.
In-Camera Effects
Now, we can’t talk about special effects without talking about the Father of Special Effects, George Melies, who discovered the use of jump cuts when his camera jammed. His first intentional use of this technique was with “The Vanishing Lady,” in which Melies, a magician, makes a woman disappear, appear as a skeleton, and then reappear.
This discovery led to him using stop-motion animation over and over again for films such as “The Astronomer’s Dream” and later in 1902, “A Voyage to the Moon.”
In 1900, miniatures and camera perspective were used to recreate a live-action train crash for the short film “A Railway Collision.”
These historical effects came together in “The Great Train Robbery” of 1903 which used the cross-cutting editing techniques, camera movement, multiple camera angles, and an early special effect of compositing two shots together. Watch the film below and see if you can find which shot!
Did you figure it out? It’s the train station interior with the train passing by the window!
I could spend forever talking about the techniques of early film. It must have been such an amazing time to be discovering film’s possibilities. However, the innovation with effects didn’t stop then and haven’t stopped even today.
Transformations, Matte Paintings, and Chroma Key
The 1900s saw the early years of film animation with the single-frame stop-motion techniques (“Humorous Phases of Funny Faces” - 1906), new camera techniques such as “trucking” (from Cabiria), and eventually, in 1914, the first on-screen transformation using a series of dissolves and stages of makeup. Unfortunately, “The Miser’s Reversion” is unavailable to be seen, but the techniques used were perfected in “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (1931) and “The Wolfman” (1941).
Camera techniques were used for a long time. Double exposure, used in “The Invisible Man” in 1933, was another technique that made for astonishing results at the time.
The 1930s also saw experimentation with 3D filmmaking, such as in “Audioscopiks,” which was nominated for an Oscar. It is a documentary that explains perspective techniques and other optics.
The 1930s were full of more animated innovation, with Disney’s use of the multiplane camera (“The Old Mill”) and then ended with “The Wizard of Oz,” which used a stocking and a blowing fan as the twister, actual tornado footage, and the juxtaposition of matte paintings to make the characters look like they were somewhere else.
In 1940, there were 14 nominees for the Special Effects Academy Award. The winner, however, was “The Thief of Bagdad,” which was the first film to use chroma-key (blue screen at that time).
Blue was the chosen color because it was significantly different than the actors' skin tones, and it would be more easily removed to isolate the actors from the background. However, eventually blue was replaced by green because digital cameras are more sensitive to green. Not to mention, blue eyes and blue jeans were frequently lost in the process of blue screen.
Green screen became the predominant technique to combine animation and live-action. Multi-million dollar films achieve some incredible feats with this technology, but now that digital cameras, computers, and green screen gear are highly accessible to the general public, many low-budget films can also achieve amazing things.
Final Curtain?
Special effects history can be very detailed, like any art history. There are so many achievements and in our digital age of the internet and virtual reality, a lot more awesome effects lie ahead.
Unfortunately, this article is long enough that I could not touch on the achievements of makeup, but I hope the information here provides you with a decent understanding of the early years of special effects in motion pictures and how those early discoveries led us to where we are today.