Wednesday, 7 October 2015

Music Video Production


Music Video History Timeline

Music Video Timeline

Music videos weren’t always made to advertise artists/bands. In the 1940s they were used as promotional videos. For example Walt Disney’s “Fantasia” was used to develop the idea of creating the animation around the music

1950s – In the 1950s it became more about live performances when it came to getting your music out there. It became more about seeing the bands for the youth’s culture and seeing these bands perform on television was even better. Popular shows such as “Top of the Pops” would have bands play live every week with crowds of people there as they were being shown all around the world

1960s – This was the start of companies actually putting money towards making small films to support the music when the bands couldn’t. Music videos started to take their own form. By this I mean they were starting to be more choreographed and ‘made up’. As well as this, the popular show Top of the Pops, started using dancers as a way of filling in for performers who couldn’t be there. ‘Pan’s People’ were a group of people who performed their routine dance to cover a song. While performing these dances (as well as bands performing you could notice how the camera angles had started to range; using close ups, high angle, low angle as a way of developing.



1970s – In the late 70s, Top of the Pops carried on its development of how they showed the music. At this point, they started using cuts from the music videos being made for the songs as well as the live performances to keep to that originality and still taking it forward. In 1975 Queen released Bohemian Rhapsody which was a new style of video as it contained special effects and showed how editing could be used in post production so it fits more into the song.

 
1980s - Michael Jackson “Thriller” An American 13-minute music video for the song of the same name released on December 2, 1983. The song was released from his sixth studio album of the same name. It was MTV's first world premiere video. One of the most famous music videos to date would be Madonna’s Material Girl from 1985. The video became massively famous, as it was an honourable pastiche (imitation) of Marilyn Monroe’s Diamonds Are A Girls Best Friend from 1953. Both videos are extremely popular and well known for their sense of style but how Madonna has used the reference to Marilyn’s video makes it so well remembered because she is in a way carrying on Marilyn’s video as you can tell from the actual songs they both represent the same things. Another, more up to date type of pastiche would be Bob Sinclair’s Rock this Party. This video pushes it just that step further and uses all sorts of references from other songs to create one. I think the idea of this is to pull in crowds that like the other songs to join all together and like this one song, which I think, is clever. It can be seen as a parody as they use children to portray the artists but I think it makes it more fun and modern.

Over the past 10 years or so, the power of technology has majorly increased. YouTube has been created which is a site containing live performances and special music videos so we have our choice of which to watch, also iTunes, iPods have been created which means we can travel with music and have to bother with watching of the music. So video didn’t really kill the radio star.
As well as this, a lot more effects have been accessible for creating videos so they look a lot more modernised with increased quality and some more futuristic