Videos from the 80's

The Beatles - A Hard Day's Night

Throughout the video there are many people and The Beatles running through the streets, laughing and having a good time. This gives out a feel good image associated with the song. The constant running idea gives the video a sense of continuity and this contrasts to the more still shots. I could use this idea in my own piano solo video, creating a brief story away from the shots of me playing the piano in another scene.

The director here also uses some interesting shots such as a pans, hand held shots and a closeup when a character comes up to a window and peers through - another clever shot I could use in my own video.

I particularly liked this shot below which is appropriate for a band, rather than a solo artist. I liked the long shot to show all three in a telephone booth and the idea of symmetry.





Michael Jackson - Thriller

This was one of the first videos to majorly emphasize the use of telling a story as well as just showing the artists making their music. At the start of this video it actually takes a whole 4 minutes before the actual track starts as Jackson and his girlfriend act out a script. The director John Landis, like A Hard Day Night's also uses the 'walking' idea to develop a sense of continuity. There is also extensive use of camera tracking as opposed to lots of cuts, to help the video flow.

Landis collaborated again with Jackson on Black or White (1991), which premiered simultaneously in 27 countries with an estimated audience of 500 million. Although it was not the first motion picture or music video to do so, "Black or White" popularized the use of "digital morphing", where one object appears to seamlessly metamorphoses into another; the project raised the standard for state-of-the-art special effects in music videos.

The History of Music Video

1939 Introduction of the Panarom
1940s Peak period of MGM Hollywood musical
1954 Elvis Presley records That's All Right (Mama)
1960 Scopitone introduced in France
1963 UK's first music TV programme Ready Steady Go (ITV)
1964 Top of the Pops TV programme begins (BBC)
The Beatles release the film and album A Hard Day's Night (Richard Lester)
1966 The Monkees' TV show starts on NBC in the USA
1967 The Beatles release TV promos for Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever , which used techniques such as reversed film effects, dramatic lighting, unusual camera angles and rhythmic editing.
1968 The animated film Yellow Submarine was an international sensation, although The Beatles themselves were only a little involved in it. Soon it was commonplace for artists to make promotional films, and bands like The Byrds and The Beach Boys were also making promotional films and were aired on pop music TV shows.
1975 Queen: Bohemian Rhapsody (Bruce Gowers)
1977 Saturday Night Fever (John Badham)
1979 Buggles: Video Killed the Radior Star (Russell Mulcahy)
1980 David Bowie: Ashes to Ashes (David Mallet and David Bowie)
1981 Pop Clips on Nickelodeon
MTV starts
Duran Duran: Girls on Film (Kevin Godley and Lol Creme)
1983 Michael Jackson: Thriller (John Landis)
Beginning of Country Music Television (CMT)
1984 Music Box starts in Europe
MTV Video Music Awards launched
1985 VH1 begins
MTV taken over by Viacom
Live Aid
1986 Dire Straits: Money for Nothing (Steve Barron) is top video
1987 MTV-Europe (MTV-E) lanched, broadcasting to 1.6 million homes
Peter Gabriel: Sledgehammer (Stephen Johnson), wins best director
1988 MTV-Europe achieves 3.5 million subscribers
1989 MTV-Europe reaches 6.7 million homes
Live broadcast from Moscow Peace Festival
Madonna: Express Yourself (David Fincher
Launch of MTV-Unplugged
1991 Madonna: Justify My Love (Jean Baptiste Mondino)
1992 MTV launches The Real World, a fly-on-the-wall documentary following the lives of seven people sharing a New York loft
1993 MTV launches TV series Beavis and Butthead
1994 REM: Everybody Hurts (Jake Scott), wins best director award
Launch of VH1 in UK
Launch of MTV-Europe Music Awards
1997 MTV UK and Ireland launches as stand-alone channel
1998 Launch of Celebrity Deathmatch
1999 Fatboy Slim: Praise You (Spike Jonze), wins best director award
2000 Launch of Jackass
2001 Launch of MTV Dance

Modern era




The key innovation in the development of the modern music video was of course video recording and editing processes, along with the development of a number of related effects such as chroma-key. The advent of high-quality colour videotape recorders and portable video cameras enabled many pop acts to produce promotional videos quickly and cheaply, in comparison to the relatively high costs of using film.

Mid 1980s - releasing a music video to accompany your new single had become standard, and acts like The Jacksons sought to gain a commercial edge by creating lavish music videos with million dollar budgets; most notable with the video for "Can You Feel It".

In the UK the importance of Top of the Pops to promote a single created an environment of innovation and competition amongst bands and record labels as the show's producers placed strict limits on the number of videos it would use - therefore a good video would increase a song's sales as viewers hoped to see the video again the following week.

Top of the Pops was censorus in its approach to video content so another approach was for an act to produce a promo that would be banned or edited. Early examples of this tactic were Duran Duran's "Girls on Film" and Frankie Goes to Hollywood with "Relax".

Countdown, which was based on Top Of The Pops, hit off in Australia but other countries quickly followed the format. At its highpoint during most of the 1980s it was to be aired in 22 countries including TV Europe. Countdown is still aired in the UK up till today as CD:UK by ITV.
Although Countdown continued to rely heavily on 'live' appearances by local and visiting acts, competing shows like Sounds lacked the resources to present regular studio performances, so they were soon using music videos almost exclusively. Countdown was able to use music videos to break a number of important new local and overseas acts like ABBA, Queen, Meat Loaf, Blondie, Devo, Cyndi Lauper and Madonna.

Michael Jackson
In the early to mid 1980s, artists started to use more sophisticated effects in their videos, and added a storyline or plot to the music video. Michael Jackson was the first artist to create the concept of the short film. A short film is a music video that has a beginning, middle and end. He did this in a small way with Billie Jean, then in a Westside story way with Beat It, but it wasn't until the 1984 release of the Thriller short film, that he took music videos to another level. Thriller was a 13 minute long music video that had a beginning, a middle and an ending. The video was directed by John Landis. Jackson then went on to make more famous short films such as, Bad (directed by Martin Scorsese), Smooth Criminal, Remember the Time, Jam, Black or White, Earth Song, and Ghosts.

Internet
As broadband Internet access has become available more widely, various initiatives have been made to capitalise on the continued interest in music videos. MTV itself now provides streams of artists' music videos, while AOL's recently launched AOL Music features a vast collection of downloadable videos. At its launch, Apple's iTunes Music Store provided a section of free music videos in high quality compression to be watched via the iTunes application.

More recently the iTunes music store has begun selling music videos for use on Apple's recently introduced iPod with video playback capability. Another new phenomenon, deriving from the popularity of blogging, is the use of so-called music video "codes", lines of HTML code including links to music videos that the individual can simply copy and paste into their blog in order to feature a given video streaming on it.

The influence of music video

The influence of music video can be seen in a wide range of media products, as well as the language used to describe the style of moving image media preferred by young people - now known as the 'MTV generation' (although this usually means anyone under the age of 30). Since the early 1980s, there has been evidence of the music video form's influence on TV programmes, such as Miami Vice, in film trailers, and in the use of revived and re-released pop songs.

The camera and editing style of the work of many film directors, from Guy Ritchie to David Fincher, clearly draws upon music video. The synergy of music and film industries have become apparent due to the production of promo clips, which are strongly similar to film trailers (and vice versa). An example of this is Men in Black where the mise en scene of the film is used in the music video, with Will Smith, the lead actor, singing the title track.

More common is the soundtrack album featuring a number of current popular acts, from which a number of music videos can be drawn, with images from the film. For example, Girls Aloud's Jump (2003) is drawn from the film in which it features, Love Actually (Richard Curtis, 2003), and is constructed so that the girls in the group appear to be in the next room to the characters in the film. All of Richard Curtis/Working Title films of the past ten years have used this kind of synergy to increase the profile of their films.


Music video becomes 'big'

Music videos represent an important part of the music industry. Artists can sell themselves not only by how they sound but how they look. Thirty years ago, music video used to be less important than it is nowadays. MTV (Music Television) was the phenomenon that gave so much power to the music video. Music video became main stream when MTV started broadcasting in 1981 in the USA, marking the beginning of the music video’s ruling over the music industry. As MTV was broadcasting 24-hour-a-day music, music videos needed to be produced urgently.

The first video ever played on MTV was ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ by The Buggles. In 1983, arguably the most successful and influential music video of all time was released — the nearly 14-minute-long video for Michael Jackson's song "Thriller".

MTV has been highly controversial: some saw as the beginning of an amazing, new, fresh era in music, others considered it to mark the end of true musical talent, as artists have been become more appreciated for their looks instead of their vocal abilities.

G324 - Advanced Portfolio

This unit is worth 25% towards your A2 final grade and is worth 100 marks.

This coursework unit will need you to produce:

• a media portfolio, comprising of a main and ancillary texts
• a presentation of your research, planning and evaluation in electronic format(s).

I will use the two following medium:

• Video
• Print

The brief:

A promotion package for the release of an album, to include a music promo video, together with two of the following three options:

• a website homepage for the band
• a cover for its release as part of a digipak (CD/DVD package)
• a magazine advertisement for the digipak (CD/DVD package)

Must complete planning by the end of the Summer Term 09.