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Special effects

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.