10 Movie Innovations That Happened Earlier Than You Think

1. Rotating Sets - When The Clouds Roll By (1919)

Far away from the wizardry of CGI, we have a classic - but notoriously expensive - movie trick: shooting a scene on a rotating set to give the impression that the characters are moving in jarringly unnatural ways.

By far the most memorable examples of this are the gravity-defying hallway fight in Inception, and the unforgettable centrifuge jog in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

And while many might tell you that the movie which pioneered the effect was Stanley Donen's 1951 musical comedy Royal Wedding, in which Fred Astaire famously dances on the ceiling, its genesis actually goes back more than three decades prior.

The 1919 comedy When the Clouds Roll By featured a sequence where star Douglas Fairbanks appears to walk on the ceiling of his character's home during a surreal dream.

It still looks terrific today, honestly, so one can only imagine how utterly beside themselves audiences were an entire century ago.

Though it's fair to say that Donen, Stanley Kubrick, and Christopher Nolan all took the concept to far more adventurous heights in their respective films, filmmakers Victor Fleming and Theodore Reed deserve immense credit for pulling it off first, during the infant years of cinema no less.