Special effects in cinema

The first special effects in the cinema were created while the film was being shot. These came to
be known as "in-camera" effects. Later, optical and digital effects were developed so that
editors and visual effects artists could more tightly control the process by manipulating the film
in post-production.
The 1896 movie The Execution of Mary Stuart shows an actor dressed as the queen placing
her head on the execution block in front of a small group of bystanders in Elizabethan dress. The
executioner brings his axe down, and the queen's severed head drops onto the ground. This trick
was worked by stopping the camera and replacing the actor with a dummy, then restarting the
camera before the axe falls. The two pieces of film were then trimmed and cemented together so
that the action appeared continuous when the film was shown, thus creating an overall illusion
and successfully laying the foundation for special effects.
This film was among those exported to Europe with the first Kinetoscope machines in 1895 and
was seen by Georges Méliès, who was putting on magic shows in his Théâtre Robert-Houdin in
Paris at the time. He took up filmmaking in 1896, and after making imitations of other films from
Edison, Lumière, and Robert Paul, he made Escamotage d'un dame chez Robert-Houdin (The
Vanishing Lady). This film shows a woman being made to vanish by using the same stop
motion technique as the earlier Edison film. After this, Georges Méliès made many single shot
films using this trick over the next couple of years.