7 Times New Technology Was Created to Make a Film

But cinematic innovation didn't begin with the advent of the microchip. Long before computers — and at all stages of film history — directors and their crews used cutting-edge technologies to bring their visions to life. And when the right technology didn't yet exist, these filmmakers created the tools they needed. Here are seven films in which filmmakers broke the mold and invented the technology they needed to create cinema magic:

When you think of color filmmaking, your mind may go to the 1939 musical "The Wizard of Oz," which was the most virtuosic use of Technicolor technology at the time. However, Technicolor had been around for decades by then. It debuted in 1917 when Wray Physioc's film "The Gulf Between" pioneered the color technology. Sadly, no intact copies remain. Technicolor remained Hollywood's gold standard through the 1950s, at which point new color film technologies from Kodak began to take over the market.

"The Jazz Singer" was cinema's first "talkie." That is, it was the first film to feature synchronized pre-recorded sound. Previously, all feature-length films used subtitles to convey dialogue, and musicians performed underscores live in the theater itself. This changed with director Alan Crosland's landmark film, "The Jazz Singer." Only the sung portions have pre-recorded sound — the dialogue still relied on subtitles — but it set the template for essentially all films to come. (Note that "The Jazz Singer" features lead actor Al Jolson in blackface, a practice now understood to be inappropriate.)

Released the same year as "The Jazz Singer," the German epic "Metropolis" was a silent film. What it lacked in sound innovation, it more than made up for in terms of visuals and special effects. Fritz Lang's movie was the first to use miniature models to represent large cities. It also used a technique to insert real-life actors into scenes that used these miniature models. This is called the Schüfftan process, named for "Metropolis" cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan.

How, in 1933, do you portray an enormous ape that can climb the side of the Empire State Building? Among other things, you use stop-motion animation, the pioneering achievement of this film, where you painstakingly move physical objects in tiny increments (capturing each increment on film) to create the illusion of fluid motion. And then you combine the stop-motion animation with live human acting. This required all sorts of cinematic trickery, including matte paintings, double-exposing frames of film, double-matting frames of film (called the Williams Process), and simultaneously exposing two rolls of film in the same camera (called bipacking or the Dunning process).

Not all of these techniques debuted with "King Kong" — for instance the Williams process first appeared in 1922's "Wild Honey." But under the guidance of two directors (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack) and three cinematographers (Eddie Linden, Vernon Walker and J.O. Taylor), "King Kong" brought all the techniques together to help weave a fantastic tale.

Orson Welles was only 25 years old when he cowrote, produced, directed and starred in "Citizen Kane." This was no impediment to his pioneering, along with cinematographer Gregg Toland, of the deep focus camera technique that remains a staple of Hollywood filmmaking. Toland called the technique "pan-focus" because it allowed everything in a shot to be in focus at once, mimicking real-life vision. Prior to teaming with Welles on "Citizen Kane," he spent two years refining the technique with different camera lenses and lighting plots. In Toland's own words, "With pan-focus, the camera, like the human eye, sees an entire panorama at once, with everything clear and lifelike."

You might best remember Bob Hoskins as an actor, but he was also the director of the first all-digital film in history: "Rainbow." Produced in Britain and filmed in and around Montreal, Quebec, "Rainbow" used no celluloid film. All footage was shot on Sony's Solid State Electronic Cinematography cameras. What's more, all post-production editing, special effects and audio were also done digitally. The finished movie was transferred to 35mm film for screening in theaters — the only point that it existed in an analog format.

"The Phantom Menace" may not be the most critically acclaimed film in the "Star Wars" canon, but its technical contributions are another story. The film's most polarizing character, Jar Jar Binks, was filmed using a then-nascent technology known as motion capture photography. This involves a live actor wearing an outfit that tracks all phases of fluid movement. Data from cameras and the actor's outfit feeds into a computer, which uses it to render an animated character.

This remains a popular way to depict nonhuman characters in live action films. Ahmed Best played Jar Jar, but the most famous motion capture actor to date is Andy Serkis, who later appeared in the "Star Wars" universe as Supreme Leader Snoke. Serkis also famously played a motion capture version of Gollum in "The Lord of the Rings" and the title character in Peter Jackson's "King Kong" — a remake of the 1933 film on this list.

Some of the biggest innovations in contemporary filmmaking have come in the post-production process. This is where directors and editors use software applications to enhance the footage that they captured on set. Justin Guerrieri, a filmmaker and editor whose editing credits include "Doom Patrol," "Taken" and "Relationship Status," reflects on how technological advancements continue to expand the boundaries of post-production editing.

"The biggest change in film and TV editing in my lifetime was the switch from editing celluloid film (literally cutting and taping pieces of film together to build a scene) to editing digital video proxy clips on Avid nonlinear computer systems," says Guerrieri. "But that switch really happened before my career, in the '90s."

As for Guerrieri's own career: "The next big change was the ubiquitous use of computer-driven visual effects using programs like After Effects, 3ds Max, Maya, Cinema 4D, Blender and Houdini." These software applications are used by both hobbyists and professionals working at the highest levels of film and television.

"Nearly every film and television show has some use of visual effects now," says Guerrieri. And it's not always in the way an audience might expect. "It could be anything as simple as painting out a piece of tape on the ground that you weren't meant to see, all the way to a fully CGI 3D-animated superhero flying in outer space."

Because film editing software is now available at consumer-level price points, it's possible that the next big innovation in filmmaking won't come from a studio-produced movie like an "Avatar" or a "Star Wars." It might well come from an indie filmmaker or a hobbyist who's figured out a new way to harness digital technology to produce cinematic magic.