In 1878, the first film was created, being Eadweard Muybridge's The Horse in Motion, I don’t

really need to say much else.

In 1892 the film Poor Pete was created, of which is often called the first animated movie
despite being only 500 frames long while being around 15 minutes long. It was painted on a
gelatin “film” and is the only “surviving” film of this medium.

In 1896, George Melies made his first film; The Vanishing Lady (aka "The Conjuring of a
Woman at the House of Robert Houdin") using jump-cutting or trickshotting. This led to him
using forced perspective and make-up in his other films like A Trip to the Moon and its
sequel A Voyage to the Moon.

The holiday season of 1898 marked the release of the film The Visit of Santa Claus or just
Santa Claus, of which is the first film to have a title card with lettering on a non-black
background.

In 1912 the movie Conquest of the Pole by Melies made a movie monster “ice giant” puppet
that used pulleys and capstans, the first of a long line that includes various Aliens, Godzilla
and the Jurassic Park dinosaurs.

The first known surviving animated movie is Gertie the Dinosaur, a 1914 movie based on
Gertie’s comic strips from newspapers’ funny pages. This was 23 years before Snow White
hit theatres, and it is currently the oldest known surviving animated film (excluding Poor
Pete). This would lead to hundreds of animated classics, including the Disney Classics
library and quite a few others.

The next revolutionary advancement in VFX was the movie Metropolis, was the first movie to
mostly rely on miniatures to simulate wide shots in this fictional city, this lead to blockbuster
movies like Godzilla and Star Wars having places and vehicles just being miniatures
suspended a distance from the camera.

The Wizard of Oz popularised a technique known as Matte Paintings, where the back part of
the set would be made entirely from a light diffusing painting with a tad of forced perspective
to make this set piece seem like a real background. This technique was later used in Planet
of the Apes and to an extent in noir movies with it eventually evolving into using projections.

Jason and the Argonauts in quite a few of its fight scenes used stop-motion animation, this
was used mostly using forced perspective and projection (a modified Matte Painting
technique), this led to movies like The Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant
Peach and the Aardman collection (Wallace and Gromit, Shaun the Sheep, Flushed Away,
etc.) as well as inspiring the Faux stop-motion style of the Lego Movies, Spider-Man; Into the
Spiderverse and Coraline.

The Ten Commandments’ scene depicting the parting of the Red Sea is a combination of all
of the above thus far, with the sea itself being a leisure-center swimming pool sized tank
being filled played in reverse, then with a portion of the water falling scrubbed to fill a minute-
minute and a half, before filling the tank, the tank was extended with a matte painting at the
end of the tank, a bunch of people and horses were supposedly just stop-motion animated
on a matte painting while Moses parts the sea. Bearing in mind this was done in ‘56, so no
CG or digital editing was available even to the most high-end studio.

The Parent Trap (1961) used an early version of split shots to make the main actress look
like two different people, of which was implemented in The Social Network or any shots with
a “clone” character.

The WestWorld (‘73/’76) series is most famous for pioneering CGI due to WestWorld having
the first 2D CGI and its sequel FutureWorld was first to use 3D CGI. Now, CGI is used in
almost everything; Games, Movies, hemorrhoid cream advertisements, Everything.

In 1994, a previously Lucasfilm-owned unnamed 3D CGI company showed off their first
short film that showed off a fully 3D character interacting with a 3D object with constant
moving lights and uncountable amounts polygons, the next year they released the first
feature film using this technique. The films in question are Luxo Jr. and Toy Story, and fully
3D movies are now considered much easier to do than even live-action movies while 2D
animated movies are considered rare now.

In the movie The Matrix revolutionised slo-mo with Bullet-time, footage so slow that a bullet
slowly sails past the camera (obviously partly CGI) and fast-rotating cameras, being an
advanced stop-motion like method, both of which are used and heavily parodied to this day.