The Hardest Effect I Ever Pulled Off

www.vulture.com: For nearly as long as we’ve had motion pictures, we’ve had illusions to put in them — and they’ve never come easy. The year 1893 saw the first public viewing of a kinetoscope film, Blacksmith Scene, and just two years later, early filmmaker Alfred Clark executed what is commonly regarded as the first special effect. In a gruesome short about the beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots, Clark stopped the film just as the blade was about to chop off Mary’s head, instructed the actors to freeze, took the one playing Mary off the set, replaced her with a dummy, and started the film again before bringing the poor dummy to its decapitated fate. Around the same time, the pioneering Georges Méliès developed a similar switcheroo, then went on to even mix live-action and animation in 1902’s legendary Le Voyage dans la Lune. The race to innovate hasn’t stopped since, and it has always involved pushing the medium to its limits.