Many musical artists made their careers a success by using music videos. As an important part of the music industry, music videos not only showcase an artist's singing talent, but also how they perform.
Music videos have been around as parts of short films such as 'A Hard Days Night' by the Beatles in 1964, although the first proper music video to be released as a promotion for a song was 'Video Killed the Radio Star' by the Buggles in 1979, which you can watch here
Since then, music videos have come along in leaps and bounds, and artists such as Michael Jackson have revolutionised the music video, making some into short films such as Thriller, which you can watch here. The music video lasts for 13 minutes and 43 seconds and has dialogue and action, something that had never really happened in a music video before, and gave other artists ideas for similar projects, although arguably none have matched Jackson's standards.
Two of the videos that are most famous for being two of the three most expensive music videos of all time are Michael and Janet Jackson's "Scream," which cost $7 million to produce, and Madonna's "Bedtime Story," which cost $5 million. "Scream" is still the most expensive video ever made.
The conventions of a music video vary depending on genre of music. However, some general conventions are: The artist is shown performing, the lyrics of the song influence what is shown in the video, the pace of editing fits the pace of the music, and the codes of dress reflect the mood of the song.
History:
In 1894, sheet music publishers 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 simultaneous to live performances. This would become a popular form of entertainment known as the illustrated song, the first step toward music video.
In 1926, with the arrival of "talkies" many musical short films were produced. Vitaphone shorts (produced by Warner Bros.) featured many bands, vocalists and dancers. Spooney Melodies in 1930 was the first true musical video series. Shorts were typically six minutes in duration, and featured Art Deco-style animations and backgrounds combined with film of the performer singing.
Animation artist Max Fleischer introduced a series of sing-along short cartoons called Screen Songs, which invited audiences to sing along to popular songs by "following the bouncing ball". Early 1930s cartoons featured popular musicians performing their hit songs on-camera in live-action segments during the cartoons. The early animated films by Walt Disney, such as the Silly Symphonies shorts and especially Fantasia, which featured several interpretations of classical pieces, were built around music. The Warner Brothers cartoons, even today billed as Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, were initially fashioned around specific songs from upcoming Warner Brothers musical films. Warner Brothers also produced the cartoon "Three Pigs in a Polka", set to Johannes Brahms' Hungarian Dances. Live action musical shorts, featuring such popular performers as Cab Calloway, were also distributed to theaters.
Blues singer Bessie Smith appeared in a two-reel short film called St. Louis Blues (1929) featuring a dramatized performance of the hit song. Numerous other musicians appeared in short musical subjects during this period. Later, in the mid-1940s, musician Louis Jordan made short films for his songs, some of which were spliced together into a feature film Lookout Sister. These films were, according to music historian Donald Clarke, the "ancestors" of music video.
Another early form of music video were one-song films called "promotional clips" made in the 1940s for the Panoram visual jukebox. These were short films of musical selections, usually just a band on a movie-set bandstand, made for playing. Thousands of "soundies" were made, mostly of jazz musicians, but also of torch singers, comedians, and dancers. Before the soundie, even dramatic movies typically had a musical interval, but the soundie put the music in the forefront; virtually all known jazz performers appeared in soundie shorts. The Panoram jukebox with eight three-minute soundies were popular in taverns and night spots, but the fad faded during World War II.
In 1964, The Beatles starred in their first feature film A Hard Day's Night, directed by Richard Lester. 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 musical sequences furnished basic templates on which countless subsequent music videos were modeled. It was the direct model for the successful US TV series The Monkees (1966–1968) which similarly consisted of film segments that were created to accompany various Monkees songs.
Film critic Roger Ebert credits Lester with constructing "a new grammar":
" ... he influenced many other films. Today when we watch TV and see quick cutting, hand-held cameras, interviews conducted on the run with moving targets, quickly intercut snatches of dialogue, music under documentary action and all the other trademarks of the modern style, we are looking at the children of A Hard Day's Night".
In 1965, The Beatles began making promotional clips (then known as "filmed inserts") for distribution and broadcast in other countries—primarily the USA—so they could promote their record releases without having to make in-person appearances.
The monochrome 1966 clip for Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" filmed by D. A. Pennebaker was featured in Pennebaker's Dylan film documentary Don't Look Back. Eschewing 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). Many "song films"—often referred to as "filmed inserts" at that time—were produced by UK artists so they could be screened on TV when the bands were not available to appear live. Pink Floyd were pioneers in producing promotional films for their songs including "San Francisco: Film" , directed by Anthony Stern,"Scarecrow", "Arnold Layne" and "Interstellar Overdrive", the latter directed by Peter Whitehead, who also made several pioneering clips for The Rolling Stones between 1966 and 1968. In the UK The Kinks made one of the first "plot" promo clips for a song. For their single "Dead End Street" (1966) a miniature comic movie was made. The BBC reportedly refused to air the clip because it was considered to be in "poor taste".
The Swedish music group, ABBA also used promotional films (most directed by Lasse Hallström) throughout the 1970s to promote their music internationally.in fact, ABBA was the first band and artist who used and changed the concept of video clip. New technologies, a renowned director, and new types of recording (outside of the studio and musical context, which used to see musical instruments in the clip) became more attractive and your clips coming from what we see today. One of his clips, Money, Money, Money hows a clip well done and quite advanced for that time. The Name Of The Game nd Summer Night City follow this style. In the 80s, the band has not progressed much in the question of improving their videos, but The Day Before You Came shows a clip that, while not having so many special effects, shows a lot of charm, maturity and class.
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 mid-1980s, grow to play a central role in popular music marketing. Many important acts of this period, most notably Adam and the Ants, Duran Duran and Madonna, owed a great deal of their success to the skillful construction and seductive appeal of their videos
2005 saw the launch of the website YouTube, which made the viewing of online video faster and easier; MySpace's video functionality, which uses similar technology, launched in 2007. Such websites had a profound effect on the viewing of music videos; some artists began to see success as a result of videos seen mostly or entirely online. The band OK Go may exemplify this trend, having achieved fame through the videos for two of their songs, "A Million Ways" in 2005 and "Here It Goes Again" in 2006, both of which first became well-known online. Artists like Soulja Boy Tell 'Em and Marié Digby also achieved some level of fame initially through videos released only online.
Unofficial, fan-made music videos ("bootleg" tapes) are typically made by synchronizing existing footage from other sources, such as television series or movies, with the song. The first known fan video, or songvid, was created by Kandy Fong in 1975 using still images from Star Trek loaded into a slide carousel and played in conjunction with a song. Fan videos made using videocassette recorders soon followed. With the advent of easy distribution over the internet and cheap video-editing software, fan-created videos began to gain wider notice in the late 1990s.
Such videos are sometimes known as OPV, Original Promotional Videos (or sometimes Other People's Videos).
A well-known example of an unofficial video include one made for Danger Mouse's illegal mash-up of the Jay-Z track "Encore" with music sampled from The Beatles' White Album, in which concert footage of The Beatles is remixed with footage of Jay-Z and rap dancers. In 2007, a new form of lip sync-based music video called lip dub became popular in which a group of people are filmed lip singing in a seemingly random spot then dubbing over it in post editing with the original audio of the song. These videos have the feeling of being spontaneous and authentic and are spread virally through mass participatory video sites like YouTube.
No comments:
Post a Comment