1908 Max Factor begins supplying wigs and makeup to small studios in Los Angeles.

1914 Italian director Giovanni Pastrone's Cabiria is the first major film to construct huge, three-dimensional outdoor sets. It is also the first film to use period costumes, in this case suggesting roughly 200 B.C.E.

1916 D. W. Griffith's Intolerance, imitating Pastrone's Cabiria, is the first Hollywood film to use colossal outdoor sets.

1919 Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari) is the first great German expressionist film. The sets are extremely nonrealistic, using forced perspective and twisted, distorted imagery to reflect the film's anxious, insane feel.

1924 F. W. Murnau's The Last Laugh (Der letzte Mann), one of the German realist Kammerspielfilme, extensively uses fluid camera movements for the first time; Murnau calls his moving camera the "unchained camera," while others call it the "flying camera."

1927 Murnau's Sunrise, winner of the first Academy Award for Cinematography (in 1929), uses meticulously constructed mise-en-scène to explore human relationships.

Abel Gance's Napoléon intercuts seemingly unrelated events to make thematic parallels.

1928 The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) establishes an award for art direction.

1929 Linwood Dunn creates one of the first optical printers. Employing the device, his special effects work throughout the 1930s culminates in his contributions to Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941).

1939 The narrative and visual style of Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game (La règle du jeu) create a powerful mise-en-scène that reflects the film's anti-Fascist message.

The credit title production designer is introduced to acknowledge William Cameron Menzies's work in Victor Fleming's Gone With the Wind.

1948 The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) establishes an award for costume design. At the time, two awards are given out: one for a color film and one for a black-and-white film.

1951 Stanley Donen's Royal Wedding, like many dance musicals of the time, uses a number of long shots to keep Fred Astaire's full body in frame during dance sequences. Also unique and extremely innovative is the use of cinematic space during a sequence in which Astaire dances up and down walls and on the ceiling.

1963 In Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Cleopatra, lead actress Elizabeth Taylor, playing the ancient-Egyptian queen, wears contemporary costumes that accentuate her beauty but retain only a hint of historical accuracy.

1964 Grigori Kozintsev's Gamlet (a version of Shakespeare's Hamlet) is filmed at Elsinore Castle, where the story takes place, for an authentic look.

1968 Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey choreographs space "ballets" to classical pieces such as Strauss's The Beautiful Blue Danube.

1975 Stanley Kubrick uses only natural light for much of Barry Lyndon. Specially designed lenses capture one now-famous scene, lit only by candlelight.

1981 The AMPAS establishes an award for makeup.

1988 Robert Zemeckis's Who Framed Roger Rabbit, nominated for an Academy Award for Best Art Direction–Set Decoration, radically combines live action and animation in its mise-en-scène, a technique previously used only sparingly, in films such as Robert Stevenson's Mary Poppins (1964).

1990 Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy, winner of the 1990 Academy Award for Best Art Direction, looks as similar as possible to the comic strip it is based on; the film's main colors are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, black, and white, all of which have no variation in hue.

1994 Chuck Russell's The Mask combines live action and animation in a way altogether different from Zemeckis's Who Framed Roger Rabbit; it essentially fuses the two, creating a sort of live-action cartoon out of the main character.

1999 Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow, while in many ways visually similar to his other films (e.g., the highly stylized Edward Scissorhands), owes much of its design and gothic feel to horror films by Mario Bava and Roman Polanski, as well as those of Hammer Studios.

2002 For the look of Minority Report, Steven Spielberg draws on technologists' predictions about the world of 2054. He also consults automobile manufacturer Lexus to design a "car of the future."