Early Film Pioneers Who Helped Cinema Along
by Tornado_Sam | created - 08 Sep 2017 | updated - 22 Jun 2021 | PublicThese early film pioneers all had a role in helping cinema become what it is today, Griffith being especially significant.
1. P.J.C. Janssen
Director | Passage de Venus
Pierre Jules César Janssen was a French astronomer born in Paris into a cultivated family. He studied mathematics and physics at the faculty of sciences, then taught at the Lycée Charlemagne in 1853, and in the school of architecture from 1865-1871, but his energies were mainly devoted to various ...
The man who "filmed" the transit of Venus across the sun in 1874, making him possibly the first to try to create photographic moving images.
2. Eadweard Muybridge
Director | Child Bringing Bouquet to Woman
Eadweard Muybridge was born in Kingston upon Thames, England, to John and Susanna Muggeridge. At the age of 20 he immigrated to the United States as a bookseller, first to New York City, then to San Francisco. In 1860, he planned a return trip to Europe, but suffered serious head injuries en route ...
Experimented with motion photography.
3. Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince
Director | Roundhay Garden Scene
Le Prince was a French artist and the inventor of an early motion picture camera born in Metz, France. His father was a major of artillery in the French Army and an officer of the Légion d'honneur. When growing up, he reportedly spent time in the studio of his father's friend, the pioneer of ...
The man who made the first celluloid film, "Roundhay Garden Scene."
4. Étienne-Jules Marey
Director | Two Fencers
Étienne-Jules Marey was a French scientist, physiologist, and chronophotagrapher. Marley started out by studying blood circulation in the human body. He then shifted to analyzing heart beats, respiration, muscles, and movement of the body. In 1869, Marey constructed a very delicate artificial ...
Experimented with chronophotography, and thus one of the earliest to shoot motion pictures on a filmstrip, making some of the first true films.
5. Thomas A. Edison
Director | The Trick Cyclist
Thomas A. Edison was born on February 11, 1847 in Milan, Ohio, USA as Thomas Alva Edison. He was a producer and director, known for silent movies such as, The Trick Cyclist (1901), The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1914) and Bicycle Trick Riding, No. 2 (1899). He also produced the first American film ...
The innovator of the Kinetograph, who also was the first to begin to commercialize film.
6. Louis Lumière
Producer | La Mi-Carême, Char et batailles de confettis
Louis Lumière was a French engineer and industrialist who played a key role in the development of photography and cinema. His parents were Antoine Lumière, a photographer and painter, and Jeanne Joséphine Costille Lumière, who were married in 1861 and moved to Besançon, setting up a small ...
He and his brother Auguste invented the Cinematograph, which they used to shoot and project films in public - the first time this had ever been done.
7. Georges Méliès
Director | À la conquête du pôle
Georges Méliès was a French illusionist and film director famous for leading many technical and narrative developments in the earliest days of cinema.
Méliès was an especially prolific innovator in the use of special effects, popularizing such techniques as substitution splices, multiple exposures, ...
The man who innovated trick photography.
8. Robert W. Paul
Producer | The Butterfly
Robert Paul was an English scientific instrument maker, pioneer of film, and foremost pioneer of the British film industry in its formative years. He was born in Liverpool Road, Highbury, North London and was educated at the City & Guilds Technical College, Finsbury. He began his career working in ...
The first person to make a film in two scenes.
9. Birt Acres
Cinematographer | Shoeblack at Work in a London Street
American-born English inventor and technician, a pioneer of early cinema design, photography, development, and patents. He was born to English parents in Richmond, Virginia, on July 23, 1854. His parents moved with young Birt to North Carolina and started a plantation there. However, the U.S. Civil...
Birt Acres was once a collaborator for Robert Paul, and filmed actualities for Paul's copies of the Kinetoscope. This really isn't very important at all but I guess I'll have to keep him on the list until I can find a better person to replace him with.
10. George Albert Smith
Director | Phantom Ride
Along with his better-known French counterpart Georges Méliès George Albert Smith was one of the first filmmakers to explore fictional and fantastic themes, often using surprisingly sophisticated special effects. His background was ideal--an established portrait photographer, he also had a ...
Innovator of the POV shot, and also the first to break down scenes into a variety of different types of shots.
11. James Bamforth
Director | The Kiss in the Tunnel
James Bamforth was born in Kirkburton, West Yorkshire, England, UK. James is known for The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899), The Biter Bit (1899) and Ladies' Skirts Nailed to a Fence (1899).
Bamforth mainly copied other filmmaker's ideas in other ways, creating elaborations and showing different ways of going about crafting a film.
12. Frederick S. Armitage
Director | A Nymph of the Waves
Often called F. S. Armitage, Frederick S. Armitage was an early motion picture cinematographer/director who began his career with short subjects for American Mutoscope & Biograph at a time when the film company was still using hand-cranked machines to display their work. Armitage was important for ...
The maker of the first time-lapse film.
13. James Williamson
Director | Attack on a China Mission
James Williamson was born on November 8, 1855 in Kirkaldy, Scotland, UK. He was a director and cinematographer, known for Attack on a China Mission (1900), Stop Thief! (1901) and Spring Cleaning (1903). He died on August 18, 1933 in Richmond, Surrey, England, UK.
Williamson was popular for his chase films/dramas, and as such he became important for his early work in narrative filmmaking.
14. Cecil M. Hepworth
Producer | Alice in Wonderland
Born in London, England, in 1874, Cecil Hepworth was one of the founders of the British film industry, directing and producing many films from 1898 into the late 1920s. Developing an early interest in films from following his father on lecture tours about the magic-lantern, he patented several ...
A British filmmaker who created the first subtitling in a film.
15. D.W. Griffith
Director | The Birth of a Nation
David Wark Griffith was born in rural Kentucky to Jacob "Roaring Jake" Griffith, a former Confederate Army colonel and Civil War veteran. Young Griffith grew up with his father's romantic war stories and melodramatic nineteenth-century literature that were to eventually shape his movies. In 1897 ...
Griffith was popular for his dramas and also became even more so for his scandalous "Birth of a Nation." Although he began similar to other filmmakers in the years 1908-1910, he later expanded on G.A. Smith's ideas of breaking a scene into multiple shots and incorporated this even further into narrative film, which is how we have it today.
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