George Albert Smith (4 January 1864 – 17 May 1959) was an English stage hypnotist, psychic, magic lantern lecturer, Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, inventor and a key member of the loose association of early film pioneers dubbed the Brighton School by French film historian Georges Sadoul.

[3] He moved with his family to Brighton, where his mother ran a boarding house on Grand Parade, following the death of his father.

[7][8] In 1892, after leaving the SPR, he acquired the lease of the St. Ann's Well Gardens in Hove from the estate of financier and philanthropist Sir Isaac Lyon Goldsmid, which he cultivated into a popular pleasure garden, where from 1894 he started staging public exhibitions of hot air ballooning, parachute jumps, a monkey house, a fortune teller, a hermit living in a cave and magic lantern shows of a series of dissolving views.

[1][2] On 29 March 1897, Smith added animated photographs to the end of his twice-daily programme of projected entertainment at the Brighton Aquarium, as an outlet for his burgeoning film production.

However Smith also corresponded with special effects pioneer Georges Méliès whose influence can be seen in The X-Rays and The Haunted Castle (both 1897) the later of which, along with The Corsican Brothers, Photographing a Ghost and, perhaps his most accomplished work from this time, Santa Claus (all 1898), include special effects created using a process of double-exposure patented by Smith.

The following year he experimented with reversing in The House That Jack Built (1900), developed dream-time and the dissolve effect in Let Me Dream Again (1900) and pioneered the use of the close-up with Grandma's Reading Glass, As Seen Through a Telescope and Spiders on a Web (all 1900).

[10] In 1902 Smith collaborated with old friend Georges Méliès at the Star Films studio in Montreil, Paris, on a pre-enactment of the Coronation of Edward VII and Alexandra of Denmark commissioned by Charles Urban of the Warwick Trading Company after rival company Mutoscope and Biograph acquired the rights to film the actual event.

In 1904, A. H. Tee took over the lease on St Ann's Well Gardens, and Smith moved to a new home in Southwick, Sussex, dubbed Laboratory Lodge, where with finance from Charles Urban, he went on to develop the Lee-Turner Process, which had been acquired by Urban following the death of Edward Raymond Turner in 1903, into the first successful colour film process, Kinemacolor.