music videos
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By Moushomi Hanif
The medium we are doing is…
A music video is a short film or video that accompanies a complete piece of music/song. Modern music videos are primarily made and used as a device intended to promote the sale of music recordings and the artist. Music videos use a wide range of styles of
film making techniques, including animation, live action filming, documentaries, and non-narrative
approaches such as abstract film.
The Little Lost ChildIn 1894 when sheet music publishers still ran the music business, Edward B. Marks and Joe Stern hired electrician George Thomas and various performers to promote sales of their song ‘The Little Lost Child’. Thomas projected a series of still images on a screen simultaneously with live performances in what became a popular form of entertainment known as the ‘illustrated song’. This has been termed the first illustrated song, the first step toward music videos.
1926In 1926, with the arrival of "talkies" many musical short films were produced. ‘Vitaphone shorts’ which were produced by Warner Bros, featured many bands, vocalists and dancers. The series entitled ‘Spooney Melodies’ was the first true musical video series. The shorts were typically about six minutes in duration, and featured art deco style animations and backgrounds combined with film of the performer singing the song. This series of shorts can also arguably be considered to be the earliest music videos.
1960-1967: Visual innovation
One of the earliest performance clips in 1960s pop was the promo film made by ‘The Animals’ for their breakthrough 1964 hit "House Of The Rising Sun". This colour clip was filmed in a studio on a specially-built set; it features the group in a lip-synched performance, depicted through an edited sequence of tracking shots, close ups and long shots, as singer Eric Burdon, guitarist Hilton Valentine and bassist Chas Chandler walked around the set in a series of choreographed moves.
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The Beatles
In 1964, The Beatles starred in their first feature film ‘A Hard Day's Night’. Shot in black-and-white and presented as a mock documentary, it was a loosely structured musical fantasia interspersing comedic and dialogue with musical sequences. The Beatles' second feature ‘Help!’ (1965) was filmed in colour. The title track sequence, filmed in black-and-white, is arguably one of the prime archetypes of the modern performance-style music video, employing rhythmic cross-cutting, contrasting long shots and close-ups, and unusual shots and camera angles, such as the shot near the end of the song. The colour promotional clips for ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane’, made in early 1967 took the promotional film format to a new level. They used new techniques, including reversed film and slow motion, dramatic lighting, unusual camera angles and colour filtering added in post-production.
1967-1973
The clip for Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" was featured in Pennebaker's Dylan film documentary Don't Look Back. Avoiding any attempt to simulate performance or present a narrative, the clip shows Dylan standing in a city back alley, silently shuffling a series of large cue cards (bearing key words from the song's lyrics). This was a unique way to present their song and it encouraged different and original ideas as the years went by.
In 1981, the U.S. video channel MTV launched, airing "Video Killed the Radio Star" and beginning an era of 24-hour-a-day music on television. With this new outlet for material, the music video would, by the 1980s, grow to play a central role in popular music marketing. Many important acts of this period, e.g. Madonna, owed a great deal of their success to the skilful construction. Two key innovations in the development of the modern music video were the development of relatively inexpensive and easy-to-use video recording and editing equipment, and the development of visual effects created with techniques such as image compositing. The advent of high-quality colour videotape recorders and portable video cameras coincided with the DIY ethos of the New Wave era, enabling many pop acts to produce promotional videos quickly and cheaply, in comparison to the relatively high costs of using film. However, as the genre developed, music video directors increasingly turned to 35mm film as the preferred medium, while others mixed film and video.
1981-1999 Music videos go mainstream
1992 – 2004 Rise of the directors
In December 1992, MTV began listing directors with the artist and song credits, reflecting the fact that music videos had increasingly become an auteur's medium. Directors such as Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, Stéphane Sednaoui, Mark Romanek and Hype Williams all got their start around this time; all brought a unique vision and style to the videos they directed. Some of these directors, including, Gondry, Jonze and F. Gary Gray, went on to direct feature films. This continued a trend that had begun earlier with directors such as Lasse Hallström and David Fincher.
Today
Today music videos make the impossible look possible due to high-tech equipment developed and graphics which are still developing. Music videos ‘Boom, Boom Pow’ by the singing group ‘Black Eyed Peas’ is a music video which make human look like computerised aliens but still look so realistic. Another example, the music video for "Rock DJ" by Robbie Williams also made things look real when it isn’t due to the graphic nature of the video which featured Robbie Williams appearing naked and peeling off his skin to reveal flesh.