Mondo Knows Facts
Melies found the substitution splice by accident
A jammed camera turned a passing bus into a hearse, and he used it According to Georges Melies, a camera jammed while he filmed a street scene, and when he played the film back a bus had apparently changed into a hearse. He turned the accident into the substitution splice, stopping the camera, changing something in frame and starting again. It became the basis of his trick films. It sits in Mondo's movies & tv collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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Tags: melies, trick-film, editing
Melies found the substitution splice by accident: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- A jammed camera turned a passing bus into a hearse, and he used it. The figure is taken from Science and Media Museum, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a movies & tv fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Movies & TV shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.