The History of Music Videos
The term Music Video can no more easily be wholly defined that the term Film. In many ways, Music Videos are all films; a combination of Visuals and Audio to entertain or evoke some form of emotion from the audience. The earliest dated 'relative' to the music video would be The Little Lost Child by Edward B. Marks and Joe Stern who commissioned a visual track to be created which was timed to synchronise with the song itself. This was known as the illustrated song and, from there, the genre ballooned.
The late 1920s brought with it the Sound Film (Synchronised Film to Music) which became an incredibly popular method of promoting an artist's song or album. Pinpointing the advent of the modern Music Video is tricky and impossible to be entirely precise, but the narrative style Video did not come into full fruition until the late 1970s and early 1980s. Prior to this, videos were predominantly performance show cases such as the plethora of Beatles hits which featured each member playing their respective instruments for the duration of the song. Post 80, however, Videos such as Michael Jackson's Thriller and Bad were released; the former including a defining moment in film history showing one of the first CG Werewolf transformations and the latter having been directed by the world renowned Martin Scorsese. This shows the integration Music Videos have with the Film industry and how much they have now progressed, from small accompanying stills to full blown epics to the extent that the most expensive Music Video to date cost $10.5 Million after inflation (Michael and Janet Jackson's Scream); seen as some films cost a miniscule fraction of this, the influence and importance of Music Videos are evident.
The term Music Video can no more easily be wholly defined that the term Film. In many ways, Music Videos are all films; a combination of Visuals and Audio to entertain or evoke some form of emotion from the audience. The earliest dated 'relative' to the music video would be The Little Lost Child by Edward B. Marks and Joe Stern who commissioned a visual track to be created which was timed to synchronise with the song itself. This was known as the illustrated song and, from there, the genre ballooned.
The late 1920s brought with it the Sound Film (Synchronised Film to Music) which became an incredibly popular method of promoting an artist's song or album. Pinpointing the advent of the modern Music Video is tricky and impossible to be entirely precise, but the narrative style Video did not come into full fruition until the late 1970s and early 1980s. Prior to this, videos were predominantly performance show cases such as the plethora of Beatles hits which featured each member playing their respective instruments for the duration of the song. Post 80, however, Videos such as Michael Jackson's Thriller and Bad were released; the former including a defining moment in film history showing one of the first CG Werewolf transformations and the latter having been directed by the world renowned Martin Scorsese. This shows the integration Music Videos have with the Film industry and how much they have now progressed, from small accompanying stills to full blown epics to the extent that the most expensive Music Video to date cost $10.5 Million after inflation (Michael and Janet Jackson's Scream); seen as some films cost a miniscule fraction of this, the influence and importance of Music Videos are evident.
No comments:
Post a Comment