technology timeline of VFX development

After desided to do VFX area, I did some research for VFX technique development， for the  technology timeline of VFX development.

There are some research from VFXHISTORY

blow are the techniques first used of, and click them are the donmonstrated for the technique from original website.

THE FIRST USE OF:

Stop Action   In-Camera Matte Glass Shot Williams Process Traveling Matte Electronic Composite Cloud Tank Schuftan Shot Rear Projection Matte Painting Motion Tracking Motion Control Real Time    Motion Control CG Element 3-D Computer Graphic    In A Composite Sky Replacement Introvision Having look at Development History & Timeline technology Ø  Stop-Action        The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, 1894 Not only is this the oldest surviving example of stop action, it is the oldest known visual effects shot. Queen Mary enters the frame, kneels down and is beheaded, all in one take. Newspaper columnists actually wondered what dedicated actress had given her all for her art! Of course, the camera was stopped mid-swing and a dummy took the place of the woman. The poor registration actually helps sell the shot, as the crowd moved between takes. Discovered accidentally one day when his camera jammed, George Meliès would soon turn the technique into an art form. Ø  In-Camera Matte        The Great Train Robbery, 1903 Because two-thirds of Méliès' films are lost, its impossible to say in which one he first used this technique, which he invented and taught to Norman Dawn. Shot on location in New Jersey, the first movie blockbuster was also the first American film to use a matte to insert detail into the windows of The Great Train Robbery, Edwin S. Porter's version of an actual Butch & Sundance Wyoming train robbery in 1900. It was also the first one-reeler (approx. 10 minutes) which also made it the longest movie yet made. The windows were blacked out during original photography, then the depot train and run-by were double exposed on the same negative through a complementary shaped cutout in front of the camera. So long as the players never pass in front of the window, it works great. Ø  The Glass Shot        Missions of California, 1907 While documenting "The Missions of California" with an 8x10 still camera in 1907, Norman Dawn ran into a problem. Mission Solano's roof tiles and timbers had long since been scavanged for other buildings, yet it needed to appear on film as it had at its founding in 1823. His solution was to paint the missing roof on glass and hang the painting in front of the camera, a trick he always credited to Méliès. When properly arranged, the painting and the real scene behind line up perfectly when viewed through the camera. Ø  Williams Process        Beyond the Rocks, 1922 The discovery of the lost film Beyond the Rocks by the Netherlands Filmmuseum in 2003 was a double cause for celebration as it contains the first use of the Williams Process to gain industry attention. after years of experimentation, Frank Williams had perfected a version of luminance keying that used a forground shot against black or white to produce a matte that would allow any background to be added behind the original scene. That's the bare bones, the reality was a lot more complicated, but as it was a trade secret, little is known of what went on in his secret lab. Unlike the chewy matte lines of yore, William's work was very refined, with excellent matte edges. Usually effects shots were cut quickly so the audience didn't have time to see the flaws. The Williams process worked so well that the arrival at Versailles lasts 30 seconds! The work in Beyond the Rocksmade a huge impression on Hollywood and Williams quickly became the go-to guy for travelling matte work. Ø  Traveling Matte        Barney Oldfield's Race For A Life, 1913 Barney Oldfield's Race For A Life was a Mack Sennett spoof of those "tie her to the train tracks" melodramas. It starred race car driver Barney Oldfield, the first man to drive a car at one mile per minute, which made him a huge celebrity in the first 2 decades of the 20th century. That's him, on the left above. Our heroes,of course, save the girl at the last possible moment, but the shot was too dangerous to be done live, even by silent film standards, so it was made in two passes. The train's run-by was one take, and the actors' performance another. Back at the studio, the actors' footage was copied until it "blocked up", creating a fairly good hold-out matte. Then, in a production camera modified to hold three strips of film at the same time - the previously shot scene, the matte, and the raw stock - a print of each element was rephotographed with its side of the matte. An optical printer would have made this easier, but that's still 18 years away. While the matte edges are a little chewy, and the contrast is much higher compared to earlier cuts of the same scene, its an extraordinarily sophisticated composite, well beyond anything thought possible at the time. Ø  ELECTRONIC COMPOSITE        Flash Gordon, 1980 For this sequence, Barry Nolan of Van derVeer Photo Effects spent a million dollars of Dino De Laurentis' money to build the world's first film resolution electronic compositing system. It would be more than 10 years before digital compositing would revolutionize visual effects. It scanned the film, extracted the matte from the blue layer, composited the elements, and filmed the shot back out from a high definition black and white CRT through separation filters onto color negative - entirely in analogue format. And it did a great job matting hair. Ø  CLOUD TANK        The Wizard Of Oz, MGM 1939 One of the most iconically memorable images from the 30's was produced by Buddy Gillespie's crew by injecting black paint through a hypodermic needle into a shallow 6'x 6' glass-bottomed tank. Shot as a black and white element for later compositing, months of practice were required to write "SURRENDER DOROTHY" backward accurately. It would be nearly 40 years before a variation of this technique was used to make actual clouds for Close Encounters of the Third Kind (or "CE3K" as it is affectionately known) in 1977. The crew wasn't having much luck until Scott Squires had the idea of creating a density barrier in the tank by filling it partially with salt water and partially with fresh. Allowed to come to rest, the differing densities formed an interface that the paint did not penetrate when injected into the fresh water layer, creating the flat-bottomed look of the alien clouds around Devil's Tower. Ø  The Schuftan Process        Metropolis, 1927 While Norman Dawn did "those old mirror shots" as early as 1912, Eugen Schuftan greatly refined the process, and more importantly, patented it. He later sold the patents to Universal. A "Schuftan" uses a front-silvered mirror in front of the camera to reflect a miniature set at 90°. The silver was scraped off the mirror where the live set and cast would be seen. Since the mirror itself is out of focus, it creates a soft split with the live background. This saved major Marcs on set construction, and was used throughout the film. AfterMetropolis wrapped, Schufftan came to the States and performed similar magic on his friend F.W. Murnau's Sunrise at Fox. It instantly became a standard tool. All the shots with leprechauns in the foreground in Darby O'Gill & the Little People (Disney, 1959) were done this way. Ø  REAR PROJECTION        Metropolis, 1927 rear projection of still images had been used since the teens, but this is the first use of amoving background image. Television had just been invented in the mid 1920's and director Fritz Lang wanted to show it in common use in the year 2026. Although the illustration from a June, 1927 Sunday newspaper supplement demonstrates a hand cranked projector mounted behind the set, the production photo clearly shows the mechanical linkage between projector and camera. Bet thatwas noisy. With the comimg of sound, rear projection would become as ubiquitous as glass shots had been in the teens and 20's. Ø  Matte Painting        Story Of the Andes, 1915 The Ransom Center at UT wants $100 per image to release any Norman Dawn material, we'll have to make do with the next to oldest matte shot. Dawn had been experimenting with latent image composites for years, and had finally perfected the technique. On advice from friends, he patented the process in 1918, but it was rapidly adopted by everyone in town. In 1929, American Cinematographer published an article by Fox effects head Fred Sersen describing his "new" technique for in-camera matte shots. This instantly became known as a "Sersen shot." Ø  Motion Tracking        Blue Thunder, 1983 By 1975, when George Lucas began pre-production on his little space movie, every studio had closed down its effects department. Many of the employees had bought up the equipment and opened their own shops, but none could handle the unprecendented volume of shots that would be required. The only answer was to build a new facility from scratch, with at least one significant addition to the visual effects arsenal: computer controlled cameras which would allow multiple passes in perfect registration. Mind you, they did similar work at RKO in the 40's - one frame at a time with tape marks on the floor. Yike. Ø  REAL-TIME MOTION CONTROL        The Palm Beach Story (Paramount, 1942) Preston Sturges' classic screwball comedy begins with a frantic pre-credit sequence which is completely incomprehensible - until the last shot of the movie, when we learn that both main characters are twins. Sharp eyes will note that Rudy Vallee's shadow is clipped by the split, since no one was standing there on the first pass. Our educated guess is a camera mounted on a worm gear drive in the floor. The first use of what would become motion control came 6 years later, when MGM debuted the Dupy Duplicator, named for its inventor, O. L. Dupy. Ø  COMPUTER GENERATED ELEMENT        Logan's Run, 1976 The cone of light which surrounds the hopefulls was rendered at video resolution and phtographed directly from the monitor, film recorders having not yet been invented. This element was then used on a conventional optical printer. Ø  3-D COMPUTER GRAPHICS IN A COMPOSITE        Young Sherlock Holmes, 1985 The phrase "never done before" comes up often when speaking of ILM. In 1985 they added to their long list of firsts by successfully placing a 3-D computer generated image into a film background. The knight was modeled and rendered with custom code, as no off-the-shelf software yet existed. The element was then transferred to film and composited optically. Ø  SKY REPLACEMENT With Death Valley standing in for Mars, director Byron Haskin still had a problem - what to do about the deep blue skies? Then, a brainstorm, simple and elegant. Use the sky as a blue screen and pull mattes from it. Haskin hadn't worked in effects since the teens for nothing        Robinson Crusoe On Mars, 1964 With the help of Introvision, a variation of front projection which puts an actor into the projection plate, Sean Connery goes EVA to face down the bad guys on a mining colony in this outer space remake of High Noon. While plates were 4x5 transparencies for this shoot, the system can use any projection format, moving or still. Relative size of the players to the plate is only limited by screen size. No matter how big the plate is projected, it is always 1-to-1 with the camera, so no increase in grain is apparent. Like front projection, Introvision uses the reflected portion of the projected image in its composite. But it also makes use of thetransmitted portion, and a second screen, along with mattes and counter matters, to allow players to pass behind as well as in front of objects on the plate. A lot of time was invested in solving the contrast build-up that comes from photographing a projected image. An Introvision stage is a pretty spartan place - not much set, and few props because everything is on the plate. Introvision was originally designed to be a production tool, much like rear-projection had been, where plates would be shot and the whole film would be done on the Introvision stage. Although this idea never really caught on, the process is frequently used for effects work and stunts.