1889 W. K. L. Dickson of the Edison Kinetoscope Company begins use of 35mm film, which remains the standard gauge of the movie industry. Other gauges used at the time include 70mm.

1895 Alfred Clark of the Edison Kinetoscope Company creates the first special effect—the substitution shot—in The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots.

Auguste and Louis Lumière introduce the Cinématographe, a camera, processing laboratory, and projector all in one compact unit.

1902 George Méliès's A Trip to the Moon is filled with astonishing optical effects, including the fade-in and fade-out and overlapping (or "lap") dissolve, multiple exposures, miniatures, and stop-motion animation.

1903 Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery contains one of the first uses of hand-painted frames; at the same time, Georges Méliès is using the technique in France. Porter also uses matte shots to combine two separate images.

1907 Norman O. Dawn invents the glass shot, a special effect still in use today. In the same year, Richard Murphy creates the first animatronic movie creature, a mechanical eagle in D. W. Griffith's The Eagle's Nest. Its successors include the animatronic shark in Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975) and dinosaurs in Spielberg's Jurassic Park (1993).

1908 D. W. Griffith pioneers the use of the pan.

1915 Technicolor is founded and begins developing a two-color additive process for color film.

1919 Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari) and D. W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms both use tinting to effectively create mood and separate interior shots from exterior ones.

Filmmakers now routinely alternate several types of shots—long shots, middle shots, and close-ups—in one scene.

1920 The development of artificial lighting continues, with sun arc lamps replacing the mercury vapor and carbon arc lamps that had been used since the beginning of film history. The sun arc lamp produces sunlightlike illumination, but it also produces a high-pitched whistling noise that (until that problem is later solved) would have rendered it virtually useless in making a sound film.

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

1925 Harry Holt's The Lost World is one of the earliest uses of stop-motion special effects.

1927 Fritz Lang's Metropolis features many dazzling special effects, including the Shüfftan process (named for cinematographer and special effects artist Eugene Shüfftan), which uses mirrors to allow full-size actors to appear against backgrounds consisting of miniature models.

Charles Rosher and Karl Struss win the first Academy Award for their cinematography on F. W. Murnau's Sunrise.

1928 As a result of the Mazda Tests—an industry-wide effort to standardize technology and launch further research and development—the American film industry adopts the tungsten incandescent lamp (for studio lighting), panchromatic film, and panchromatic makeup.

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).

1932 Technicolor introduces its subtractive color process in Walt Disney's "Silly Symphony" cartoon Flowers and Trees. The industry temporarily reverts to using the sun arc lamp because it produces the quality of light necessary for shooting with color film stock. By this time, manufacturers have solved the hissing problem that had made the lamp seem extinct when sound was introduced.

The Academy aspect ratio of 1.33(1.37):1 is introduced.

1934 The Mitchell BNC 35mm camera becomes the industry-wide standard; its capabilities enable Gregg Toland to develop deep-focus cinematography.

1935 Rouben Mamoulian's Becky Sharp is the first feature-length movie produced using the three-color Technicolor process.

1937 Color enters mainstream Hollywood production.

1938 Eastman Kodak introduces Super XX film stock, which can record images in very low light.

1939 John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath bases many of its compositions on famous photographs from the Great Depression, which add to the film's realism. The same year, The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind (both directed by Victor Fleming) introduce brilliant Technicolor to a mainstream audience used to black and white.

1941 Orson Welles's Citizen Kane revolutionizes filmmaking, combining Gregg Toland's deep-focus cinematography, filming with low sun arc lights (with Super XX film stock), matte shots, and meticulously constructed mise-en-scène, itself designed to emphasize depth of space.

Technicolor introduces Monopack.

1942 Luchino Visconti's Ossessione is the first Italian neorealist film, shot with natural light on location.

1948 Alfred Hitchcock's Rope raises the long take to a new level; the film is a series of ten shots (ranging from 5 to 10 minutes, with the average shot running 8.13 mins.) and edited unobtrusively to give the appearance of almost seamless continuity.

French theorist Alexandre Astruc introduces the idea of the caméra stylo: that the filmmaker can write with the camera as the novelist writes with the pen; free camera work, uninhibited by cinematographic tradition, later becomes a stylistic hallmark of the French New Wave (nouvelle vague).

1952 Arch Oboler's Bwana Devil is the first film shot and projected in the 3-D process. Merian C. Cooper and Gunther von Fritsch introduce Cinerama, a widescreen process originally utilizing three cameras and three projectors to record and project a single image, in This Is Cinerama.

1953 Twentieth Century Fox introduces Cinemascope, which has an aspect ratio of 2.35:1.

1958 Alfred Hitchcock creatively uses the zoom lens in Vertigo, giving the audience a feeling of vertigo by moving the camera back and zooming in at the same time.

Orson Welles's Touch of Evil begins with its now-famous three-minute, twenty-second crane shot, incorporating nearly all types of framing, motion, and shots.

1959 Panavision is introduced in William Wyler's Ben-Hur and eventually replaces Cinemascope.

1960 Actor-director Jerry Lewis invents and makes first use of a video assist system on The Bellboy, an idea that Francis Ford Coppola perfects on One From the Heart (1982).

In addition to continuing its use of the tungsten incandescent lamp, the film industry also adopts the halogen lamp, which produces illumination that is more efficient, brighter, and longer lasting than the tungsten lamp.

1964 Influenced by the French New Wave and considered by many the precursor to the music video, Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night, starring the Beatles, makes ample use of handheld cameras, zooming, and fast- and slow-motion.

1968 Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, using, among other techniques, an early form of motion control, sets a new standard for special effects.

All feature releases from major studios are in color.

1976 Steadicam is introduced.

1977 The evolution of special effects marks another milestone with the release of George Lucas's Star Wars.

1978 John Carpenter's Halloween makes significant use of a very early version of the Steadicam.

1980 Stanley Kubrick makes intimate, fluid Steadicam cinematography a distinctive hallmark of The Shining.

Martin Scorsese films Raging Bull in black and white (with interpolated color sequences) for aesthetic and dramatic effect.

1983 Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi uses time-lapse cinematography for aesthetic and dramatic purposes.

Colorization is invented by Wilson Markle and Brian Hunt.

1986 Ted Turner announces plans to colorize over one hundred classic black-and-white films.

1995 John Lasseter's Toy Story is the first completely computer-animated full-length film.

2001 Alan Cummings and Jennifer Jason Leigh's The Anniversary Party and Spike Lee's Bamboozled are filmed entirely on digital video.

2002 The Sony HDW-F900 digital camcorder, which shoots at the 24 fps speed of a film camera and thus emulates the film look, becomes industry standard for shooting movies.