World Visual Effects Day Address // December, 2024
Topic // The History and Inventor of Visual Effects | The Cinemagician
Speaker // Samuel Collett, Author at UnmaskingVFX
Length // 14 Minutes, 53 Seconds
Uploaded // 2025.03.17
Transcript
Right, everyone. Well, it is as always a joy to be with you and to be able to share with you things that I’ve learned and experienced. Particularly as today we observe World Visual Effects Day.
Double your joy today as we dive into some rich history. This year I’ve had the tremendous privilege of teaching through the visual effects pipeline. It’s been great to have a deep dive into how visual effects happen, what happens at each step. That’s been remarkable and I can’t wait to share it with you. I’m sure you all will benefit greatly from it.
But today we’re going further back to the roots of visual effects. We’re looking at a man known by many as the father of visual effects, a cinema magician. We’ll look into why later, and there truly is a magical story.
He is known by some and unknown by others, but I hope by the end of this talk, you will have gained a new appreciation for him, his work, and his legacy. Who is this man? This father of visual effects cinema magician? His name is George Méliès.
George Méliès was a Frenchman who had a very interesting life. With that in mind, we’ll be looking at what I’ve titled “The Life and Legacy of George Méliès.”
So we’re going to be looking at his life. As he grew up, he was in film, but he was more than that. He wasn’t just in film. How was he a magician? Then we’ll look at his legacy that lives on today.
For those of you who know anything about the history of visual effects, you might object to what we’re looking at today. How is he the father of visual effects if there were others before him creating films using visual effects? This makes no sense. We had Alfred Clark, we had others.
My response to that would be: while others combined images to create single composite images, that’s a composite image made up of multiple parts. This is not what I would consider visual effects in filmmaking. This is more like Photoshop—putting images together is cool, but I wouldn’t say it’s visual effects, particularly in the case of film.
The other major contender for this role, who maybe has more of a chance, is a man named Alfred Clark. He used what’s called a stop trick to create an illusion of a beheading in a film about Mary, Queen of Scots, I believe. The stop trick is basically like a cut. You cut it at a specific point, swap something out, and then continue. That was called the stop trick.
While this is very cool and technically visual effects, I see it more as a Zach King-esque illusion—one of those short-form video tricks that is impressive but certainly no Industrial Light & Magic.
Industrial Light & Magic is almost the gold standard of visual effects. It’s a visual effects studio that’s worked on many projects: Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Jurassic World, even television shows today. It’s impressive, but I wouldn’t really consider it visual effects.
This was not the focus of Alfred Clark’s career. He was a filmmaker who found this fun tool. The man who got closest to being the Industrial Light & Magic of this type of production was the man in question today, George Méliès.
As we look at his life, I think you’ll increasingly see that he really did deserve this title. When I consider who would be the father of visual effects, it makes sense to be a magician. I’m giving away a little bit there, but it makes sense. It’s his trade. He trades in magic, he deals in magic.
At the time we’re looking at in his life, effects had been used already, but the users of visual effects didn’t have what George Méliès had: the experience of using a combination of story and spectacle to wow an audience. Other filmmakers lacked those skills.
Like I said, we’re looking at the life and legacy of this great man, and we’re starting off with his life.
I have a quote here from Guillermo del Toro, film director and producer, and he said this is a great way to start off:
“At the time that the Lumière brothers were recording a train coming into the station, the workers exiting the factory, there was a man called George Méliès recording what was not there, what wasn’t possible. At the time of chronicle, fable was born.”
That’s a great quote. The time of Chronicle Fable was born. My favorite part: people were used to capturing reality, capturing what was going on—that was chronicle. But George Méliès was a man for fable, something that wasn’t there, that wasn’t true.
At a young age, Méliès developed a love for magic—not just any magic, not party magic, but stage magic. This came from time he actually spent in London. He spent time in London working for his father’s company. I believe he was a shoemaker.
He sent his son George to work in London, where he saw shows full of magic on the stage and said,
“That’s cool. I want to do that.”
He returned to Paris with this newfound love of magic. After his father died, he actually bought a theatre, the Théâtre Robert-Houdin. Although it was already fitted with many gadgets and gizmos, it was still a little bit old. It was a bit outdated. There were lights, there were trap doors. That wasn’t the modern technology needed to create a cutting-edge theatrical show.
This led to less-than-satisfactory attendance rates at the shows.
What did he do? He needed to boost the attendance for what he did. He used innovation and new tricks to later boost the numbers with the help of over 30 new tricks and illusions that hadn’t been seen before. With the help of all that, the attendance then became acceptable at the theatre.
So what do we have? We have the young boy who worked with his father. He got older, went to Paris, learned magic, the trade. He loved it. He came home. His father died. Instead of carrying on with the shoes, he bought the theater. And now we have a man who’s doing tricks in the theater. People love it. But what did he want to do? He wanted to branch out to other mediums. He wanted to share his magic in other ways rather than just people standing there, sitting there rather, and watching.
So what did he do? Well, at some point in his life, I’m not sure when, but obviously after he was working at the theatre, he attended a demo of the Lumière Brothers’ Cinematograph. Sorry, Cinematograph at least. The Lumière brothers were innovators in camera and cinema, capturing, recording, and playing it back, projecting. He attended the demo and he was inspired. He offered to actually buy the technology, buy a copy, I believe, but the brothers refused to sell it because they wanted it to be further developed and further used. This stage manager was not the man that they were looking for to invest in it.
While he still managed to get his hands on something similar and was able to show short films at his theatre, he later managed to get a camera and then he began making his own short films. These films were full of tricks and magic. From the year 1896 to 1913, he made over 600 films of various lengths. This is according to Wikipedia, a very trusted source.
These early films had little to no storyline, but they focused more on the tricks themselves. They focused on the magic that George Méliès understood that people love spectacle, they love to see things that are spectacular, and he utilized that as he made short films. Later, he made some more story-driven films. One of them is A Trip to the Moon, which is an example. It’s basically, sorry, loosely based on Jules Verne’s book From the Earth to the Moon.
The success of his films allowed him to build studios, and his films were, in the end, shown internationally. This is a man who went from working in the shoe business to having films full of visual effects. Over 500 short films full of tricks, double exposures, and his having been shown across the world. He used miniatures and stop tricks to create real magic.
So I think now you can see that was his life, that this is a man who very much does deserve the title of the father of visual effects. And you can even watch his films today. And they are actually, for the time, they are marvellous, phenomenal. And he’s done tremendous work there.
What about his legacy? How does this whole story tie to my story? How does it affect us today?
So secondly, we’re going to look very briefly at his legacy. Every day we wake up in a world where people go to the theater and come home with a feeling of wonder. They are immersed in a world lost in a reality that is not their own. When this feeling of wonder wears off, they wonder how it was created. If perhaps the person in question is a filmmaker, he is inspired to create great things.
But how does this continue? How are we still feeling the same way that those who watched the original Star Wars trilogy felt when we watched the latest Star Wars show on Disney Plus?
The answer is innovation. Tom Freston said, sorry, Tom Freston said,
“Innovation is taking two things that exist and putting them together in a new way.”
George Méliès, the cinema magician, is one of the greatest examples of innovation when it comes to storytelling. He had magic and he had reality, and he mixed them together in a really eye-catching way. So he had the ability to capture chronicle visually. He had magic and he had story. This is what he’d learned from the stage. He mixed them together in a new way, and that, Tom Freston, I think, would say that’s innovation.
George Méliès was an innovator in film. Whenever you watch a film, you can think about the cinema magician. Odds are what you’re seeing is built on the foundation of his work, his illusions. He did set extensions. Today we do digital set extensions. He did stop tricks. Today we do moves.
He truly was the cinema magician, and I think definitely deserves that title of the father of visual effects. And I think now you can agree with me and echo that this is truly a magical story. It’s so fitting that a man who invented pretty much visual effects was a magician. But then he found a way to capture it and to enhance it in the camera. And that’s what we’ve been doing ever since.
We have been finding new ways to do it, but it’s hard. That’s what visual effects is. It’s creating spectacular things that you couldn’t find in reality.
So let’s close with that quote from earlier. The end of the quote:
“At the time of Chronicle, Fable was born.”
The time of Chronicle, Fable was born.
That is the life and legacy of George Méliès. Thank you. Hopefully you enjoyed that. Hopefully you learned something. And I think it’s very fitting that there is a day, World Visual Effects Day, that we can look at visual effects, appreciate the artists, and appreciate the rich, rich history.
The history of visual effects is not necessarily just a bunch of guys sitting at computers in Blender working outrageously hard. They were working hard and they did have computers, but I think there’s a lot of magic. I mean, you just heard about that studio, Industrial Light & Magic. And that’s what we are always trying to unmask, unveil here: the magic of visual effects. It’s not some secret that’s locked away in some vault somewhere. It’s something that you can know about. And if you put some work in, it’s something you can do.
So thank you for your time. That is the life and legacy of George Méliès.