Georges Méliès

Georges Méliès was a French filmmaker famous for leading many technical and narrative developments in the earliest cinema in the late 1800s. He was very innovative in the use of special effects. He was one of the first filmmakers to use multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, dissolves, and hand-painted color in his films. As well as accidentally creating the technique called the stop trick/substituion which helped him create amazing special effects and magic that for the time would have been mind blowing to see.
I’m a massive fan of the how he didn’t let anything especially the technology limit his vision.

He made hundreds of films and two of his most famous films are considered as some as the earliest forms of the Science Fiction film genre . Although their approach is closer to fantasy. But they involved space travel, mixed with early ideas of what could be on the moon which included more fantasy style creatures liek goblines rather than aliens. I think thse films in particular have helped shape films like Forbidden Planet and shows like Lost in Space. And stylistically without Méliès A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la Lune), videos like Tonight Tonight by the Smashing Pumpkins wouldn’t really exists in the style they do. Horror can also be traced back to Georges Méliès’s Le Manoir du diable (1896). He was a pioneer for his time but due to big business issues he became bankrupt and became a toy maker, and was never really acknowledged until years later, when he was re-discovered and awarded numerous accolades.

To write this i’ve basically paraphrased an article on Wikipedia and added a few of my own comments