This technique had also been used to produce animatics, simple animated mockups used to previsualize motion pictures, but Burns's name has become associated with the effect in much the same way as Alfred Hitchcock is associated with the dolly zoom.
[1][2] The feature enables a widely used technique of embedding still photographs in motion pictures, displayed with slow zooming and panning effects, and fading transitions between frames.
[6] He has also cited the 1957 National Film Board of Canada documentary City of Gold,[7] co-directed by Colin Low and Wolf Koenig, as a prior example of the technique.
[15] In a 1961 letter to The New York Times, photographer and filmmaker Louis Clyde Stoumen surveyed earlier uses of the technique by himself and others: Curt Oertel made his Michaelangelo, with important storytelling use of still material, in 1940 (released as Robert Flaherty's The Titan around 1949).
Belgium's Henri Starc began imparting dramatic film form to still images in 1936, and his lyric World of Paul Delvaux (1947) is an acknowledged classic.
Ben Berg and Herbert Block of Hollywood have for years been making a series of story-telling dramas out of paintings and prints, including a life story of Goya.
I myself pioneered the dramatic use of still photographs (rather than paintings or prints) in a story-telling sequence for Arch Oboler's 1950 Columbia feature Five, and have for more than a decade continued development of this form—in my independent feature The Naked Eye (1956), the featurette The True Story of the Civil War (an Academy Award winner, 1956[16]), Warner Brothers' The James Dean Story (1957), and most recently [...] for [...] ABC-TV's Winston Churchill, the Valiant Years.
[19] Specific seventh-generation video game consoles also feature versions of this effect, including Nintendo's Wii Photo Channel, Sony's PlayStation 3 and within the Last.fm app for Xbox 360.
Burns initially declined, saying that he did not allow his name to be used for commercial purposes, but finally he had Jobs give him some equipment (which he later donated for nonprofit use) in exchange for permission to use the term in Apple products.