25 Pivotal Moments That Revolutionized Filmmaking Forever

Inventors had been trying to make moving pictures work for years, but in the 1890s, it was French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumiére who brought film to the masses. The first film they screened? A 46-second long cut of workers exiting a factory. Audiences couldn't get enough.

Lois Weber was one of the earliest film directors, and a one of the most important at that. She experimented with sound, editing, and camera work. Her 1913 film, Suspense, popularized split-screen effects.

In 1925's The Lost World, special effects pioneer Willis O'Brien brought dinosaurs back from extinction with stop-motion technology, moving miniature models one frame at a time.

While filmmakers had experimented with adding synchronized sound from the beginning, it was the 1927 film The Jazz Singer that changed everything when star Al Jolson spoke the words, "You ain't heard nothin' yet," and the talkies were born.

Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino may be playing around with 70mm film these days, but the technology has been around for decades, going as far back as 1930 with The Big Trail. The 70mm widescreen epic was also a young John Wayne's first starring role.

Willis O'Brien practically perfected stop-motion in 1933 with the giant ape in King Kong. Not merely a spectacular effect, King Kong was a living breathing character audiences cried for in the end.

Film always had color. From painted frames, to early experimental techniques, but it was the famous three-strip Technicolor process that brought vivid, realistic color to the screen. The first three-strip Technicolor feature film, Becky Sharp, debuted in 1935.

Walt Disney was already a big Hollywood name, famous for his Mickey Mouse shorts. But in 1937, he premiered his biggest gamble—a full length animated feature called Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The rest is history.

Orson Welles' first movie, Citizen Kane in 1941, is commonly cited as the best film ever made, and it's hard to argue with that. The film took just about every filmmaking technique in the book, and smashed them together into cinematic perfection.

By 1952, TV was starting to eat into film profits. Filmmakers needed to put on a show. Enter: Cinerama. The new process used three cameras, and then three projectors running simultaneously to produce an incredible, immersive widescreen image.

In 1953, the first CinemaScope widescreen film, The Robe, premiered. Cinemascope was simpler and cheaper than Cinerama, and it wasn't long before widescreen became the standard for all film going forward.

In 1953, House of Wax 3D came out, starting the first real wave of 3D films. The format had technical issues, and was mostly used as a gimmick, but it foreshadowed our modern 3D craze.

Plenty of films, from The Three Caballeros to Anchors Aweigh, to Song of the South, had mixed live action with animation, but no film did it better than 1964's Mary Poppins. Who doesn't love dancing penguins?

It took some enterprising Canadian inventors to flip 70mm film on its side, producing the largest film format ever created. It was first shown at Expo '67 in Montreal, and by 1971 the Cinesphere in Toronto was built, showing incredible IMAX documentaries to an eager public.

Jaws, released in 1975, is often cited as the first blockbuster. A young Steven Spielberg brought together great actors, a mechanical shark, and all his filmmaking talent to scare audiences silly, kickstarting a new Hollywood revolution.

George Lucas had already seen huge success with American Graffiti, but it was Star Wars, released in 1977, that changed everything. From its advanced special effects, to its lived-in world, it became the model for every Hollywood blockbuster that followed.

Early experiments with computer animation were rudimentary at best, but in 1982, Disney released Tron. The movie flopped, but its incredible visual style, and its pioneering use of CGI makes it one of the most important films in history.

In 1985, Barry Levinson's Young Sherlock Holmes featured the first ever photoreal CGI character, a stained glass knight brought to life by John Lasseter at the Lucasfilm department that would later become Pixar.

Willis O'Brien may have done it first with motion-capture, but Steven Spielberg did it best in 1993's Jurassic Park. The film uses plenty of large animatronics, but it was his use of CGI that impressed audiences with effects that still hold up over two decades later.

In 1995, Pixar, partnering with Disney, released Toy Story—the first computer animated feature film. And while it took a few more years, the computer animation eventually became the standard at every American animation house and movies are no longer animated by hand.