This 16 minute film was one of the first ever music videos in history with the work of W C Handy, the composer of the song, wanted it performed visually as well as musically so he hired Bessie Smith (seen as possibly the most important female jazz/blues singer in history) which they recorded in 1925 and is now considered to be one of the most important recordings in history. Featuring a short/simple storyline of Bessie looking for her man, surrounded by assorted groups of couples sitting at tables with a large band in the background. The man soon enters with another woman younger and more glamorous than Bessie, he insults Bessie and then leaves leaving her at the bar singing in regards to the loss of her lover.
The first show was broadcasted in 1964 presented by DJ Jimmy Savile live from the Manchester studio, which featured (in order) the Rolling Stones with "I Wanna Be Your Man", Dusty Springfield with "I Only Want to Be with You", the Dave Clark Five with "Glad All Over", the Hollies with "Stay", the Swinging Blue Jeans with "Hippy Hippy Shake" and the Beatles with "I Want to Hold Your Hand", that week's number one - throughout its history, the programme proper always (with very few exceptions) finished with the best-selling single of the week. People watched to find out who was number one that week; in turn this 'forced' people to watch he music videos in the process, making the videos become more popular and well known.
A Hard Days Night is a British comedy film starring the Beatles and directed by Richard Lester. It was produced during the peak of Beatlemania. Playing several of their hits at the time the film is supposedly a filler between each song. The techniques developed by Richard Lester are still used today in many different modern media, he helped formalise and establish the codes of how to film a band (a live performance at the time) using: close ups of the lead singer, cutaways of instruments being played, filming the band together and separately, cutting to the beat of the song etc. however it always reverted to the focus point of the singer.
This is the time where the green screen and video process commonly known as Chroma key came in to play within music videos. Although previously used in films, Black Sabbath (one of the first bands to use Chroma key) took their unusual style and fashion and used a green screen to express this in the video 'Paranoid'. This ability allowed editors to explore different techniques such as Superimposing (placing shots over one another) to create a weird effect the band desired.
Introduced with the words "Ladies and Gentleman, rock and roll" MTV changed music video history. Initially opening with "The Buggles- Video Killed the Radio Star". MTV revolutionized the music industry becoming a influential source of pop culture and entertainment all over the world. In it's early days it consisted of basic music videos however the record industry recognized MTV's value and ability to promote leading to money investments in making creative music videos, bringing forward famous music video directors such as Spike Jonze.
In 1982 the vivid music video ‘Rio’ by Duran Duran was filmed by director Russell Mulcahy, it featured dreamy iconic images of the band in Antony Price suits, with the focus action of them playing and singing around on a speeding yacht over the Caribbean sea. Small segments within the video show Reema Ruspoli teasing and making fools of the band members as they are trying to live out their assorted daydreams.
Michael Jackson contacted John Landis in 1983 to see if he was interested in creating music video for this song ‘Thriller’ over a year later after releasing the single. He approached John Landis purely due to his work of ‘An American Werewolf in London’. Landis agreed with the exception that it must be a short film and Jackson embraced this idea, the 13-minute film that resulted changed the music video for ever, becoming less a promo clip than a cultural phenomenon. At midnight on 2 December, after weeks of trailers and hype, MTV showed it to the world. This Secured MTV’s reputation as a new cultural force; dissolved racial barriers in the station's treatment of music. This also created a market for VHS rentals and sales as viewers were desperate for the ability to see it when they wanted. In 2009, became the first music video to be inducted into the Library of Congress's National Film Registry. This video heavily influenced the famous Music Video director Spike Jonze, who furthermore created some of the most iconic Music Videos in history. Nevertheless, the Thriller video was set to be so expensive – $900,000, to pay for not just the filming and effects but 10 days of dance rehearsals – that Landis and Jackson had to find a way to fund it (Jackson had paid the $150,000 cost of the Beat It video himself). It was Landis's producer George Folsey Jr who came up with the idea of the making-of video, which could be sold to networks as bespoke content. MTV paid $250,000 and Showtime $300,000 for the rights to the documentary, Jackson would take care of upfront costs, and the video was able to go ahead, with the label coughing up $100,000. When the documentary was released on VHS, selling for $29.95, it attracted more than 100,000 advance orders in its own right. In result there was 9.5m Total home video and DVD sales of The Making of Michael Jackson's Thriller
The song ‘Walk this Way’ was originally recorded in 1975 by Aerosmith and was blindly sampled over ten years later by Run DMC a fast rising rap group they further discovered where it came from and got in touch with Aerosmith. A genre-smashing video was born. The concept is straightforward: The two bands practice in adjacent studios. Their music is different, but their servitude to the power of the beat is the same. Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler busts through that wall, and a new partnership is formed. This not only had an effect on their personal career but added new elements to music as this combined two different genres of music together with an outstanding outcome. Both groups saw immediate benefit from the success of the single. Raising Hell became a million-selling LP, reaching the Top 10 on the pop chart and No. 1 on the R&B album chart, the first rap album to ever hit the spot. And Aerosmith’s faltering career from the early 1980’s got a huge boost.
In 1995 at the peak of multi-million rap video craze, The Pharcyde, using an incredibly small budget for the time, created one of the most innovative rap music videos ever mad in their song “drop”. Spike Jonze, at that point an already accomplished music video director having worked with artists such as: Notorious B.I.G, Weezer, The Beastie Boys and Fat Boy Slim etc., directed this based of the idea of the backwards concept from J Dilla’s ingenious production (featuring a looped sample playing backwards) for Drop. Filmed in Los Angeles the video feature the group performing the song backwards, replayed backwards, which when combined with the chopped, spacey beat gives the video surrealistic quality. To further this effect the group also worked with linguistic experts to recite the entire song backwards.
Founded and produced in 2005 this website/social media platform gave users the ability to upload, share and view all types of content. During the summer of 2006 this was the fastest growing website on the web with more than 65,000 videos being uploaded per day delivering over 100 million video views per day. This majorly developed the Music Video industry as viewers and users were able to access the music videos on demand at ease all in on place instead of having to wait for it to be broadcasted on TV. Still growing to this day, as this ability expands with more popularity this benefits the artist with not only income but advertisement for the users to consume their music.
In the year of YouTube ‘Ok Go’ used this opportunity in their favour on July 31, 2006 with their music video to their hit song “Here it goes Again” and as of March 2010, it had been viewed over 50 million times. The video consists of an innovative, simple, single-take choreography using Treadmills. This majorly increased the band popularity and their ability to become more creative in their music videos, as shown in songs such as “Needing/Getting” and “This too shall pass”. This video led the band/group to winning awards: ‘YouTube Award for most creative video’ & ‘2007 Grammy Award for Best Short Form Music Video’. Using this simple idea on an upcoming social media platform made the Artist and their content viral due to their innovative ideas.
Now in modern day this video is really a display of our now achievable outcomes within music videos, with a highly aesthetically pleasing and displaying our technologies ability to create something with highly realistic features yet all computer generated imagery. This idea was all generated at spurges of the moment and chance supposably originally when the lead singer Chris Martin bumped into Andy Serkis on a flight who famously played Caesar in the newly developed 'Rise of the Planet of the Apes' and following the 'Dawn of the Planet of the Apes'. Again this closely related film techniques in their music video with stunning and surreal CGI. Using this idea of apes the director Mat Whitecross claimed when creating the video and using the modern technology "The incredible thing about performance capture is you can see the characters and the environment already on the screens around you, or through the camera viewfinder. So I wasn’t watching the band, I was watching a group of apes." and claiming “The beautiful and terrifying thing about this technology is that everything can be improvised and changed – endlessly,” says Whitecross. “No decision you ever make is final – you can swap camera angles, change timings, or the position of the band – or even their appearance. Nothing is fixed, other than their performances. “On the one hand it’s incredibly liberating, but it’s also easy to get lost. So we decided to only use the camera I operated on the day. It narrowed the possibilities in an interesting way – we thought giving the camera a handheld, natural feel would make the impossible things you were seeing seem more possible. I loved this way of working.” The director worked alongside Imaginarium and VFX house Mathematic to create the elaborate CGI and special effects that appear in the promo and the band decided they definitely wanted the apes to look real, rather than cartoony. So Silvia at the Imaginarium created these beautiful designs that fused elements of the band’s real faces with those of chimps. We played around making them more and less similar before deciding on the ultimate look.. From idea to completion, the video took six months to make. It was commissioned by Parlophone Records, which orchestrated a deal with Beats for an excerpt to be used in the brand’s latest advert, featuring a section where the band discover a Beats speaker buried among leaves on the ground.
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