The history
From a jammed camera in Paris in 1896 to LED walls, digital armies and 2,800-shot epics made in Hyderabad.
Visual effects are pictures that were never really in front of the camera, or not all at the same time. For a hundred years, film makers faked them with stopped cameras, mirrors, black velvet and coloured screens, then glued the pieces together on film. Computers changed everything in the 1990s, and today studios from London to Hyderabad build whole worlds shot by shot.
1896
Stop trick (substitution splice)
Georges Méliès, France
1915
Rotoscope invented
Max Fleischer, USA
1918
Travelling matte patented
Frank D. Williams, USA
1927
Mirror trick to combine models and actors
Eugen Schüfftan, Metropolis, Germany
1940
First proper bluescreen travelling matte
Larry Butler, The Thief of Bagdad
1976–77
First digital motion-control camera
John Dykstra and team, ILM, USA
1985
First fully computer-made character in a feature (widely considered)
ILM and John Lasseter, Young Sherlock Holmes
2004
Oscar-honoured crowd software with thinking agents
Stephen Regelous, Massive, New Zealand
2019
LED volume stage used at scale for a series
ILM StageCraft, The Mandalorian
1895 – 1930
Magicians and pioneers discover that you can stop a camera, paint on film and bounce actors off mirrors, all without a computer.
1896
Méliès was a stage magician who fell in love with film. By his own account, his camera jammed while filming a street, and when he played the film back a bus seemed to turn into a hearse. He turned the accident into the stop trick: stop the camera, change something, start again.
Why it mattered. It showed that film does not have to show reality, which is the whole idea behind visual effects.
1902
1 September 1902
A Trip to the Moon sent a group of astronomers to the Moon in a shell fired from a giant cannon. Méliès used substitution splices, double exposures, painted sets, models and smoke to tell the story. Some prints were even coloured by hand, frame by frame.
Why it mattered. It is widely considered the first great special effects film, and its rocket-in-the-eye image is still famous.
1915
1915 (patent 1917)
Fleischer projected film of his brother Dave, dressed as a clown, one frame at a time and traced him. The result was Koko the Clown, who moved like a real person. He called the machine a rotoscope.
Why it mattered. Tracing shapes on every frame, now called roto, is still one of the biggest jobs in any effects studio.
1917
17 September 1917
Phalke had learned magic tricks before he made India's first feature film in 1913. In Lanka Dahan, based on the Ramayana, he used trick photography to show gods and wonders. Audiences loved it, and it became one of his biggest hits.
Why it mattered. Indian cinema used effects to tell its epics from the very start, a hundred years before Baahubali.
1918
Williams patented a way to film actors against a plain black background and turn their outline into a moving mask, called a travelling matte. The mask let a lab print the actor over a different background. It became known as the Williams process.
Why it mattered. Every green screen shot today still starts with this idea: separate the actor from the background.
1927
January 1927
Metropolis needed actors walking among huge skyscrapers. Schüfftan put a mirror at 45 degrees in front of the camera, scraped away part of its silver, and reflected small models while real actors showed through the clear part. On screen they seemed to share one giant city.
Why it mattered. It was an early way to extend a set far beyond what was actually built, the job digital set extension does today.
1930 – 1977
Mattes and optical printers let artists cut people out of one piece of film and drop them into another, first against black, then blue.
1933
October 1933
To make a man with no body, the actor wore black velvet in front of black velvet walls, so only his clothes showed. The pieces were combined with travelling mattes. Fulton said about 63,000 frames were retouched by hand to hide the mistakes.
Why it mattered. It shows how much patient hand work has always been behind effects, long before computers.
1940
December 1940
Butler filmed actors in front of a bright blue screen, then used the blue to make mattes that cut them out cleanly. A genie escaping from a bottle was one of the scenes. The film, starring Sabu, a teenager from Mysore, won the Oscar for special effects.
Why it mattered. It was the first proper bluescreen travelling matte, the ancestor of every green screen in the world.
1944
An optical printer is a projector pointing into a camera, so one strip of film can be copied onto another, layer by layer. Dunn had used his printers on King Kong (1933) and Citizen Kane (1941). The Acme-Dunn model, built for the US military, earned an Academy technical award in 1944.
Why it mattered. For fifty years, almost every effects shot was put together, or composited, on a machine like this.
1959
Early bluescreen left ugly outlines around actors. Vlahos worked out a colour-difference method that compares the blue and green in each part of the picture to make a much cleaner matte, and refined it for Ben-Hur. In 1976 he and his son founded Ultimatte to build keying machines.
Why it mattered. His colour-difference idea is still at the heart of how keying software pulls a clean edge.
1975 – 1989
Computer-driven cameras repeat the same move again and again, so spaceship models can fly past each other perfectly.
1975
26 May 1975
Lucas set up his own effects team to make the space battles for Star Wars. He called it Industrial Light & Magic, or ILM. It began in Van Nuys and moved north to San Rafael in 1978.
Why it mattered. ILM went on to lead many of the big firsts in digital effects for the next 45 years.
1977
25 May 1977
The Dykstraflex was a camera rig run by a computer. It could pan, tilt, roll and glide down a track, then repeat the exact same move as many times as needed. That let the team film each spaceship model separately and stack the shots perfectly.
Why it mattered. Repeatable, recorded camera moves are the ancestor of today's camera tracking, where the computer matches the real camera.
1985
4 December 1985
In one scene, a knight made of stained glass climbs out of a church window and attacks a priest. It was made entirely by computer and printed onto film with a laser. It is widely considered the first fully computer-made character in a feature film.
Why it mattered. It proved a computer could make a character, not just shapes and logos.
1985 – 2001
Computers learn to make water, metal men and dinosaurs that look real, and to freeze time around an actor.
1989
9 August 1989
In The Abyss a tube of seawater snakes through an underwater base and copies the faces of the actors. ILM spent about six months making 75 seconds of computer graphics for it. The film won the Oscar for visual effects.
Why it mattered. It was ILM's first 3D computer character that showed emotion, and it convinced film makers that computers were nearly ready.
1991
3 July 1991
The T-1000 villain could melt, flow through bars and reshape itself. Up to 35 ILM artists made about five minutes of it, in roughly 42 computer shots. Rendering was so slow that 15 seconds could take ten days.
Why it mattered. It showed computers could make a main character that shared the screen with real actors.
1993
11 June 1993
The dinosaurs were first planned as stop-motion puppets, until ILM's computer tests won the day with less than a year to go. The film has only about six minutes of computer dinosaurs, cut together with about nine minutes of life-size robot puppets. Tippett's animators steered the digital dinosaurs using sensor-fitted puppets.
Why it mattered. After Jurassic Park, film makers knew almost anything could be made in a computer and look real.
1995
22 November 1995
Toy Story was the first feature film made entirely with computer animation. It is animation, not visual effects, but it used the same tools: 3D models, lights and rendering. See CGIClear for how that works.
Why it mattered. It showed audiences would watch computer images for a whole film, and pushed the tools forward fast.
1999
31 March 1999
For bullet time, about 120 still cameras stood in a curve around the actor, plus two film cameras. They fired one after another, so the camera seems to fly around a frozen moment. Computers filled the gaps between cameras and added the background.
Why it mattered. It mixed a real camera rig with computer work so well that the effect was copied in films, ads and games for years.
2001 – today
Digital crowds, performance capture and LED walls arrive, and India becomes both a maker of huge effects films and a workshop for the world.
2001
December 2001
Peter Jackson needed battles with huge armies. Regelous wrote Massive, software where every digital soldier is an agent that senses, decides and fights on its own. It won an Academy science and engineering award in 2004.
Why it mattered. Crowd software like Massive is how films now fill a battlefield without hiring a hundred thousand extras.
2002
December 2002
Serkis acted Gollum's scenes and his movements were recorded with motion capture. Animators mixed that data with hand animation, then painted Serkis out and put Gollum in. See MocapClear for how motion capture works.
Why it mattered. It made audiences take a digital character seriously as a real performance.
2009
December 2009
Most of Pandora, and all of the Na'vi, were made in computers. Actors wore head-mounted cameras and face markers so their expressions could drive the digital characters. Wētā alone made more than 1,800 stereoscopic effects shots.
Why it mattered. It showed that a film could live almost entirely in a digital world and still feel real.
2010
1 October 2010
Enthiran starred Rajinikanth as a scientist and as Chitti, the robot he builds. His face was 3D scanned, a US studio built animatronic robots, and computer effects filled the action scenes. It was called India's most expensive film at the time.
Why it mattered. It won the National Film Award for special effects and showed Indian films could aim at Hollywood-scale effects.
2012
6 July 2012
In Eega a murdered man is reborn as a fly and takes revenge. The film had more than 2,000 animation shots. Work on the fly was planned for four months but took fourteen.
Why it mattered. It won the National Film Award for special effects and proved a Telugu film could build its whole story around a digital character.
2014
July 2014
Prime Focus World merged with Double Negative, a London studio that had won an Oscar for Inception. The combined company, DNEG, grew studios across many Indian cities. It has since won Oscars for films like Interstellar, Dune and Dune: Part Two.
Why it mattered. It showed that big Hollywood effects are now often made by Indian artists, working in India.
2015
10 July 2015
Huge sets for Mahishmati were built at Ramoji Film City, then extended digitally into a whole kingdom. More than 600 artists at 18 facilities worked on effects, including a giant waterfall and a war. In one scene, about 3,000 people on set were made to look like 50,000.
Why it mattered. It proved an Indian film could do world-class set extension and crowds, and it won the National Film Award for special effects.
2017
28 April 2017
Baahubali 2 had close to 2,500 effects shots, split into about 13,500 separate tasks. Around 35 studios around the world each got the jobs they were best at, such as clouds or water. Makuta built the look of Mahishmati.
Why it mattered. It showed how one huge film can be shared out across studios on different continents.
2019
April 2019
Avengers: Endgame had 2,496 visual effects shots. The team finished with only about two and a half weeks to spare before release. Studios including ILM and Weta Digital shared the work.
Why it mattered. It shows that in a modern blockbuster, nearly every shot has been touched by effects artists.
2019
November 2019
ILM built StageCraft, a curved wall of LED screens about 20 feet tall that wraps 270 degrees around the actors. A game engine draws the background live and moves it to match the camera. See VirtualProdClear for how it works.
Why it mattered. Actors can see the world they are in, and the light from the screens falls on them naturally, with no green spill.
2022
25 March 2022
RRR had about 2,800 effects shots from 18 studios, finished in around seven months. Many are hidden in plain sight. For the famous animal attack, actors fought around remote-controlled vehicles that were later replaced by digital tigers, bears, wolves and deer.
Why it mattered. The best effects are often the ones nobody spots, and Srinivas Mohan won another National Film Award for special effects.
By the numbers
Big effects films went from a few dozen computer shots to thousands, and Indian films are now among the largest.
Did you know?
Green screens are green partly because camera sensors have twice as many green pixels as red or blue, a pattern Bryce Bayer of Kodak patented in 1976.
In HD video, green makes up about 72 percent of a picture's brightness, so a green screen stays bright and clean with less light.
Jurassic Park has only about six minutes of computer dinosaurs. Most of its dinosaur time on screen is life-size robots and puppets.
For The Invisible Man in 1933, about 63,000 frames were fixed by hand, one at a time.
For one Baahubali scene, about 3,000 people on set were digitally multiplied to look like 50,000.
The people
1861 – 1938 · Magician and film maker · France
He made over 500 short films full of tricks and is widely called the father of special effects.
1870 – 1944 · Film maker · India
A former stage magician, he made India's first feature film and used trick photography to bring gods and epics to the screen.
1883 – 1972 · Animator and inventor · Born in Kraków, worked in the USA
His rotoscope traced live action frame by frame, the ancestor of every roto artist's job.
1893 – 1977 · Cinematographer and inventor · Germany
His part-silvered mirror let actors walk among the model skyscrapers of Metropolis.
1904 – 1998 · Effects cameraman and inventor · USA
His optical printers combined layers of film for King Kong, Citizen Kane and decades of films after.
1908 – 1988 · Special effects artist · USA
He made the first proper bluescreen travelling matte for The Thief of Bagdad and won an Oscar for it.
1916 – 2013 · Engineer and inventor · USA
His colour-difference method made clean bluescreen edges possible, and his company Ultimatte made keying machines for decades.
born 1947 · Visual effects supervisor · USA
He led the building of the Dykstraflex motion-control camera for Star Wars and won Oscars for it.
born 1946 · Visual effects supervisor · USA
At ILM he steered The Abyss, Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park, and has won nine Oscars.
living · Software engineer · New Zealand
He created Massive, the crowd software that filled the battles of The Lord of the Rings.
active since 1996 · Visual effects supervisor · Vijayawada, India
He supervised the effects of Enthiran, Baahubali: The Beginning and RRR, and has won several National Film Awards for special effects.
living · Visual effects supervisor · India
A co-founder of Makuta VFX, he supervised Magadheera, Eega and Baahubali 2, sharing out each task to the studio best suited to it.
Where it happened
Sources
Dates marked “c.” are approximate, and historians sometimes disagree about who was first. If you spot a mistake, tell us.
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