History of the Music Video – MV

In this piece of work, I am going to be looking at the history of music videos, in order to understand the development of music videos and film.

1920’s through 60’s

Music videos in the 1920s were very simple, only showing the band/artist, in simple settings, playing their music.

This is a clip of ‘The Ingenues’, playing a song called ‘Chasing the blues’ in 1928. Its very simple, it features the girls sitting in orderly lines, where they begin to play their instruments, the camera zooms in and pans across the girls at 0:15, however they don’t move around the room during the video at all. No video effects have been used, and the video is in black and white.

This is a video of Bessie Smith, preforming a song called ‘St. Louis Blues’ along with a band, in 1929. The video shows Bessie, sitting at a bar while the band plays on the other side of the room. Throughout the video, the camera pans through the band and to Bessie. The video clip itself is in black and white and no special effects have been used.

This is a small clip from the 1940 animated film, Fantasia, the clip itself features no humans, instead, the flowers are dancing along to a ballet. The video itself, while still pretty simple, is in colour, which, at the time, was still a relatively new thing. The camera angle stays the same throughout the clip, as the flowers dance towards and over the lens.

Television in the 50’s

At the beginning of the era, Television wasn’t something everyone had, In fact, only 350,000 households had TV sets, and they were generally first bought in order to watch the Queen’s coranation.

By the 60’s, most of the population had a TV set.

This is the video for The Beatles, ‘Hey Jude’, released in 1968. The video is in colour, it mostly focuses in on the band, although there are a lot more people in the room, the video also doesn’t use any effects.

This is the music video to Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole lotta love’, released in 1969. The video uses a lot of panning shots of crowds during concerts,but generally sticks to close-up shots of the band, the video does however incorporate slow motion, and layers images and scenes over the video clips.

1970’s

This video, for the Electric Light Orchestra’s ‘Mr. Blue Sky’, released in 1977, is very interesting, as it incorporates a slight amount of animation along side the band playing, as well

The Bee Gees kept the video for ‘Stayin’ Alive’, released in 1977, simple, simply walking around, and cutting to close ups of the members in odd places, the video is in colour, and no effects have been used.

1980’s

MTV: Music Television

“Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll.” – John Lack, when the broadcast first went live.

MTV was launched in1981, with the first song played being ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ by The Buggles, MTV would later go on to dramatically change the music video industry forever, and become a huge part of modern culture.

I actually really love this video for A-HA’s song ‘Take on me’, released in 1985. The video uses an animation technique called Rotoscoping, which means, an artist will draw over each individual frame of a video, in order to create an animation. I really like the effect it gives the video.