A Brief History of Special Effects

Time Magazine has submitted a nice "Cliff's notes" version of the history of "Special Effects" in the movies. It's all here - cell animation, stop motion, explosions, water effects, CG characters, bullet time and even stereo are covered in brief here. It's always very interesting to note which movies are chosen to represent key innovations in visual effects, and this article covers "old school" versus "new school" ways of achieving effects. For example in the "doubling" section, the visual the iconic shot of twins Susan and Sharon in "The Parent Trap", wherein Disney employed some optical gadgetry to make Hayley Mills her own twin. The paragraph then goes on to explain how doubling was achieved in "The Social Network" with more complicated face replacement to create the twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss out of a single actor.

 I found in this article a great deal of fodder for further research. It must have been difficult to distill so much work into 16 simple paragraphs.