4. Melies' Camera Breaks, Invents Trick Photography
George Melies is rightly revered as a valuable pioneer of early film, what with his iconic A Trip to the Moon continuing to fascinate audiences over 100 years later. However, ahead of that greatness, Melies was fiddling around with a camera in 1895 while trying to shoot some film footage for his magic show, when suddenly, the camera jammed. This continued for several minutes before righting itself, yet when Melies later inspected the footage, he noticed that the downtime between the camera stopping and starting had created a curious visual illusion. A carriage was passing the camera when it stalled, and by the time it started again, a hearse was in frame, giving the impression that the carriage had instantaneously transformed into a hearse. Melies employed this technique - called the stop technique - for visual trickery in many subsequent works, namely for making people disappear from the screen and appear elsewhere.