Over the 100+ years of the medium’s existence, myriad advances have been made in movie-making technology; naturally, many of them weren’t leaps, but gradual improvements. For years, artists and engineers would slowly build upon each other’s ideas – with occasional highlights making the most impact on moviegoers.

For instance, Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) was far from the first film to employ realistic CGI, but the level of mastery over this technology secured the movie’s pioneering status on that front. In this article, we’ll be looking at films that arguably were the “first” to do what they did – but, as always with such things, caveats apply!

Star Wars (1977): Dykstraflex

As a director, George Lucas has made a name for himself not only as a visionary capable of rich, intricate worldbuilding, but also a tireless pioneer of new technology, even becoming the first to shoot a major motion picture entirely on digital cameras (Attack of the Clones, 2002). But arguably an even more influential invention happened much earlier – back in the 70s.

For Star Wars (1977), special effects lead ​​John Dykstra and his colleagues developed Dykstraflex, the first-ever digital motion control system for film cameras. The system was crucial to the movie’s breathtaking space battle shots, which look impressive even today – and thus, in many ways, was responsible for the film’s unprecedented success around the globe.

Titanic (1997) / Ghosts of the Abyss (2003): Undersea camera robots

In a reverse example, here’s a technology that was prompted by the completion of a film. Following the release of Titanic (1997), director James Cameron channeled his fascination with the famous ship into a groundbreaking documentary film about the wreck itself.

In order to descend to the very depth of the North Atlantic, the crew employed two Russian MIR submersibles and a pair of purpose-built, remote-controlled camera robots nicknamed Jake and Elwood. Filming at a depth of nearly 4 kilometers, the robots were able to capture stunning images of the iconic ship. In an eco-conscious move, the fiber optic cables connecting the bots to the main sub were entirely biodegradable!

Metropolis (1927): Schüfftan process

Director Fritz Lang’s silent sci-fi masterpiece was a milestone in many regards. An expensive, visually rich sci-fi epic, it introduced viewers to themes and imagery that influenced films for decades to come, from the aforementioned Star Wars to The Matrix (1999).

But there’s one particular technique in Metropolis we’re interested in today: the Schüfftan process, named after the film’s cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan. By employing clever mirror trickery, he was able to transpose live actors onto painted and miniaturized sets of a dystopian futuristic city. Though the technology would eventually give way to more sophisticated techniques, it hasn’t disappeared completely: the Schüfftan process was used to great effect in Blade Runner (1982) for the replicants’ iconic eyes, as well as in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003).

The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-2003): MASSIVE crowd simulation software

Speaking of which – Peter Jackson’s Oscar-laden fantasy series, too, has produced its own share of movie innovations. Alongside the oft-discussed use of miniatures, motion capture, forced perspective, and other trickery, one influential piece of tech developed for the films was MASSIVE (Multiple Agent Simulation System in Virtual Environment), a software package that could simulate countless thousands of computer-generated warriors for the trilogy’s epic battle scenes.

Crowd simulation, after all, is a tricky thing: to produce a seamless visual, it has to account for the interactions between each individual participant. Since its creation, MASSIVE has played a part in pretty much any blockbuster that involves large crowds of digitally generated or composited extras; even the condensed list on Wikipedia is highly impressive.

Young Sherlock Holmes (1985): First entirely CGI character

Although this 80s Barry Levinson feature is hardly remembered nowadays, its legacy cannot be overstated: for this story about the famed detective’s childhood adventures, the George Lucas-founded SFX studio Industrial Light & Magic had created the world’s first fully computer-generated character in a feature-length film. Though it only makes a brief appearance in the film, the visuals hold up splendidly even 40 years later.