Film Title and Description of Visual-Special Effects ( part 2)

Dickson Experimental Sound Film (1895)

The first known (and only surviving) film with live-recorded sound made to test Edison's Kinetophone (with a cylinder-playing phonograph and connected earphone tubes) was this 17-second short film. It was noted as the first film combining both sound and motion. The projector was connected to the phonograph with a pulley system, but it didn't work very well and was difficult to synchronize. It was formally introduced in 1895, but soon proved to be unsuccessful since competitive, better synchronized devices were also beginning to appear at the time.

The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots (1895), aka The Execution of Mary Stuart

This was the first special effect (in-camera), reportedly, of the controversial execution (decapitation) of Mary, Queen of Scots (Robert Thomae) on the execution block, using a dummy and a trick camera shot (substitution shot or "stop trick"). In the short sequence, Mary knelt down, and put her head on the block as the executioner raised a large axe. When the axe was brought down, her head rolled off the chopping block to the left - where the executioner picked it up in the final frame and held it up.

A Railway Collision (1900)

Director R. W. Booth and producer Robert W. Paul (Paul's Animatograph Works) made this short 22-second film - one of the earliest attempts to realistically re-create a large-scale railroad disaster by using miniature scale models; the film depicted two trains speeding toward each other on the same track, and colliding on the embankment.

The Great Train Robbery (1903)

In Edwin S. Porter's landmark film, a primitive one-reeler action picture about 10 minutes long with 14-scenes, he incorporated parallel editing, innovative camera movements, location shooting, jump-cuts or cross-cuts - and this early special effect - a composite made of two separate images. The in-camera matte effect was of two separately filmed segments: the interior of a train station and the window (where a shot of a passing train was matted). It was filmed in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio, which would remain virtually unchanged for half a century.