The picosecond barrier to high brightness electron pulses has been broken. A 3rd generation electron gun has been designed that is 100x brighter with respect to diffraction than 3rd generation light sources. The importance of this advance is related to the intrinsic ability of electron diffraction to observe atomic details. With the advent of femtosecond electron pulses it is now possible to capture full structural details of transition state processes. In other words, watch chemical reactions occur in real time and actually watch the atoms move in response to the reaction forces --- make the "molecular movie" showing the death and birth of molecules. Time- resolved diffraction studies with this new technology have focused on strongly driven solid-liquid phase transitions of aluminum as a model problem. The signal to noise and available diffraction orders were sufficiently high to give direct access to fluctuations leading to the disordering or melting process and the associated radial distribution function. Referenced to the initial lattice structure, the information content of the time dependent radial distribution is analogous to two-time correlation studies of liquids using various coherence spectroscopies. However, there is an important distinction. Femtosecond electron diffraction has the unique ability to directly connect the correlation function to atomic details. In effect, this work has atomically resolved a thermally sampled barrier crossing, a process common to all transition state processes.