Georges Méliès was a film director and producer who was born in Paris in 1861. Before becoming one of the most influential filmmakers, Méliès owned the Théâtre Robert-Houdin where he worked as an illusionist. He was a great storyteller who changed the way we look at cinema and started the visual effects revolution. Let's take a look at his incredible innovations.
This film director was one of the first to implement the technique of editing, that is, unifying one moving image with another. But the discovery came about by accident. One day he was filming Paris traffic when, suddenly, his camera jammed. Although he fixed the problem and continued filming, later when he was projecting the film, he noted a big change: a bus, as if by magic, transformed into a hearse. This is how he created the stop trick, a technique that consists of filming an object, then turning the camera off and placing the object out of frame, and then turning the camera on. The final product is a scene that creates the illusion of an object disappearing.
Georges Méliès knew how to stand out from the start. He recognized the potential of the cinematographer and differentiated himself with his ability to tell stories. He also introduced the narrative continuity, that is, the plot relation between scenes, something that hardly existed until then, as directors only recorded scenes of everyday life and therefore, the result was something very similar to a documentary.
The film director also began to make films with countless visual effects: levitating heads, people disappearing or objects changing their shape or size. Georges Méliès used all kinds of resources, he transformed each film into a great act of magic. One of his most celebrated films, for its astonishing and ambitious tricks, was A Trip to the Moon (1902). Inspired by a novel by Jules Verne, the fourteen-minute film follows a group of scientists who travels to the Moon, sleeps under the stars, fights aliens, and escapes back to planet Earth.
Méliès' cinematic tricks were the first steps to today's visual effects. The magic that characterizes George Lucas, Luc Besson (Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets) or Roland Emmerich (Midway, Moonfall) would not have been possible without the great narrative and technical variety of Georges Méliès. To this day, Hollywood masters remember the French magician as the one who opened the Pandora’s box of the seventh art.
Stay tuned for more news!
Image: Google
