If you go see "Godzilla" this weekend, you'll likely be blown away by how scary-real the 355-foot monster looks.
But the road to creating that giant lizard was a long one. YouTube user Jim Casey pieced together an amazing three-minute video that highlights some pivotal scenes showing the evolution of visual effects over the last 100+ years.
Check out some of the earliest film effects:
The video starts with a nod to the motion photography of Eadweard Muybridge. His series of photographs of a running horse proved the idea that during its gait, all four of the horse's hooves were off the ground at once:
In 1896, Georges Melies stopped his camera in order to create the illusion of making a woman disappear:
This clip from 1900 was simply called "The Railway Collision."
"The Thief of Bagdad" came out in 1924 — note the fast cut to show the second jump:
This is a scene from Fritz Lang's 1927 classic dystopian film, "Metropolis."
The "Invisible Man" un-wrapped himself in 1933:
In 1939, "The Wizard of Oz" made a splash for its use of Technicolor and the flying monkeys:
This giant was far less complex than today's movie monsters:
This is a scene from the 1953 science fiction film "War of the Worlds" by H.G. Wells:
In the 1956 movie "The Ten Commandments," viewers were blown away when Moses parted the Red Sea:
This clip shows a metamorphosis scene from 1981's "An American Werewolf in London."
After this, the effects start moving too fast to get a good capture, but the rest of the hypnotic video is totally worth a watch:
(Hat-tip to The Verge where we first saw this video.)