The camera crane goes back a long way. There was a crane-like shot in D. W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916), but exactly how it was executed has been lost in the mists of time. The first recorded use of a camera crane occurred during the production of the Universal film Broadway in 1929. For the next 50 years or so, cranes were mainly one-off studio or owner-user jobs, each one bigger and heavier than the last. To the best of my knowledge, the first firm to manufacture handy, location-type camera cranes for general sale was Colliacomo of Italy in the early 1960s. These cranes could be broken down into three parts for transportation (dolly, hydraulic extendible central pillar, and boom), and came with a unique tracking system — prefabricated lengths of interlocking twin tubing with sleepers between them, rather like giant toy railway tracks, which could be laid down in sections.
In 1970, two young French cameramen, Jean-Marie Lavalou and Alain Masseron, were planning to shoot inside an operational submarine. They wanted to track down the length of the boat, booming in and out of various nooks and crannies and passing through narrow bulkheads as they went. They contrived to fit a Camflex camera on a gyroscopic pan-and-tilt head at the end of a long pole, which, in turn, was on a tripod mounted to a narrow Elemack dolly. A year or two later, when a more developed version of this rig — dubbed the "Louma" crane — was first being serially manufactured, an electronic remote-controlled head and a lightweight video assist were fitted to the camera. With this, the modular remote-control camera crane was born.
A very significant advance in camera supports was the Helivision anti-vibration helicopter mount (Lamorrisse, France, 1955). It isolated the camera from the unwanted movements of its means of support by attaching the camera to a gimbal and using a counterweight to keep the camera stable and free of the effects of gravity and centrifugal force. This mount was first used on The Red Balloon, which went on to win the 1955 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. The film offers a prime example of new technology not only enhancing the way a script can be interpreted, but inspiring the script in the first place. The opening aerial sequence in The Sound of Music, 10 years later, was also shot using a Helivision mount.
On the lab and optical special-effects side, the developments that have most enhanced the possible interpretations a script are the additive light source, the multi-head optical printer, and the aerial image.
The optical printer grew out of the first primitive, pre-turn-of-the-century step printers, even before there were rotary printers. But the greatest advance in optical printing came during the 1960s with the introduction of the additive light source. In the days of black-and-white film, printers needed only to change the brightness of the printer light source in order to maintain correct frame-by-frame exposure control. When neg-pos color film was introduced in the early 1950s, color-correction filters were added to make the necessary color adjustment by subtracting whichever color was too bright, regardless of how it affected the adjoining colors in the spectrum. The improvement, introduced by Bell & Howell in the mid-'60s, separated the "white" light into three individual light paths, controlling the brightness of the three primary colors separately and recombining them at the end. The difference, particularly when combining several film elements to create a single image, was enormous.
The use of a single, pure color — be it blue, yellow, red, green or even dead black or brilliant white — as background for an image that is later combined with other images, so that a pair of high-contrast black-and-white masks can be struck for subsequent combination printing, goes back a long way in the art of special-effects cinematography. The Williams (1918) and the Dunning (c. 1925) processes were based upon such methods. The first time a bluescreen backing was used with color photography was by Lawrence Butler (U.S.) and Tommy Howard (U.K.) for The Thief of Bagdad in 1938/39. However, the 1970s practice of making a "color difference" matte, so that a color in the foreground that is similar to the background can be extracted without creating holes in the matte, was a significant advance.
The use of aerial images in optical printers and animation rostrums — whereby one or more images from other strips of film can be back-projected, focused onto a plane in space, combined with other images and then re-photographed without loss of image quality — made a great impact on the art of optical printing.
The final series of developments ushering cinematography into the new millennium have arrived thanks to the introduction of the computer: computer-aided optical design, computer-controlled motion, computer-manipulated images, and computer-generated imagery. To thank any one individual for all the benefits that the computer has given us is like thanking the inventors of electricity for making it possible to shoot with artificial lights.
The impact of the computer on the cinematographic interpretation of screenplays is so overwhelming that it may be difficult for anyone to fully understand its importance. Of course, there's no doubt that something newer still will be invented in the not-too-distant future, thus rendering today's miracles passé. Yet another generation will grow up proclaiming the arrival of a new paradise, as our pioneering forebears did when the film loop was invented.
