History of music videos

2.  To identify the key events and dates in the history
and evolution of music videos.
 To be able to discuss the effects of developments in
music videos in the way people consume music.
 To be able to provide detailed examples to back
up the points made about the development in music
videos.

3.  In 1927,Warner Bros. produced the
first sound film ever.
 This feature-length motion picture
featured not only the new technical
development of a synchronized
recorded music score, but also the
narrative of the musical (a
combination of lip-synchronous
singing scenes and dialogue scenes)
 Its release heralded the commercial
ascendance of sound films and the
decline of the silent film era.

4. • Bessie Smith appeared in a two-reel short film called Saint Louis Blues
(1929) featuring a dramatized performance of the hit song.
• Could this be regarded as a music video?

5.  King of Jazz is a 1930
American colour film starring
PaulWhiteman and his
orchestra.
 King of Jazz was filmed
entirely in the early two-
colorTechnicolor process
and was produced by Carl
Laemmle Jr. for Universal
Pictures.

6.  Max Fleischer and Walt Disney produced a series of
“soundies” during the 1930’s using as a narrative motive
some of the musical hits of the day.
 Could these be regarded as a music videos?

7.  During the 1930s, due to
the technical developments
in synchronised sound, the
musical genre exploded.
 These were not considered
as music videos, just
musical films, which was a
big genre of film during this
period.

8.  OskarVon Fischinger, who had pioneered the synchronised music film in
Germany in the 1920s, and produced a series of avant-garde music film, works
onWalt Disney’s Fantasia, an animated film based around famous pieces of
classical music.
 The language of musical film expanded for the first time into an animation
feature film format.

9.  Soundies start to become common as promotional devices for
artists, such as in this film for FatsWaller’s “Honeysuckle Rose”

10.  1964. Richard Lester directs A Hard Day's
Night a British musical comedy starring
the Beatles during the height of
Beatlemania.
 It was written by Alun Owen and
originally released by UnitedArtists.The
film portrays several days in the lives of
the group.
 This film arguably set out the basic visual
vocabulary of today’s pop music videos,
influencing a vast number of
contemporary musicians at the time to
create similar moving images to
accompany their music.

11.  D.A. Pennebaker and other counterculture filmmakers start collaborating with
pop artists to make films based on the songs of those artists, sometimes using
concepts and ideas brought by the performing artists themselves.

12.  These videos used techniques borrowed from film, such as film effects,
dramatic lighting, camera angles and rhythmic editing.
 They were produced for the UK Cinebox visual juke-box of the 1960s

13.  Top of the Pops in the UK and SoulTrain in the USA were two
popularTV music programs in the 1960s and 1970s.This was the
first time that pop artists had the chance to regularly feature onTV
in a music specialised program.
 What was the advantage of this for the music industry?

14.  1966-1968.‘The Monkees’, the American answer toThe Beatles,
has its ownTV show on NBC.
 Each episode included a specially made film segment that was
created to accompany their songs that was used in theirTV series.

15.  In order to replace a lip-synch performance
on Top of the Pops, Queen created a music
video specifically for that song to be played
on TV.
 Bohemian Rhapsody was the first made on
the magnetic video tape format (as
opposed to 16 mm film, which was the
standard format).
 Therefore, under this criteria, it would be
accurate to consider Bohemian Rhapsody
as the "first music video", as long as it isn't
confused with "first music promo film".

16.  The key technical developments of the modern
music video (high quality videotape recorders
and portable video cameras) enabled many
pop acts to produce promotional videos quickly
and cheaply, rather than using film which was
substantially more expensive.
 By the mid 80’s, releasing a video to
accompany a new single had become standard.
Production companies and record labels
resorted to high budgets (the average budget
for a music video at the time was $1,000,000
with artists such as Michael Jackson and
Madonna going up to $5,000,000, in the case of
Madonna’s Express yourself, directed by David
Fincher in 1989, or the £2,200,000 of Michael
Jackson’s Bad, directed by Martin Scorsese in
1987.

17.  Music video would, by the mid-1980s, grow
to play a central role in popular music
marketing
 Madonna, owed a great deal of her success
to the skilful construction and seductive
appeal of her videos.
 Although many see MTV as the start of a
"golden era" of music videos and the
unparalleled success of a new art form in
popular culture, others see it as hastening
the death of the true musical artist, because
physical appeal is now critical to popularity
to an unprecedented degree.

18.  1981- MTV is launched.The first video to be aired is
Buggles ‘Video killed the Radio Star’.
 In the early to mid 1980s, artists started to use more
sophisticated effects in their videos, and added a
storyline or plot to the music video.

19.  Pink FloydTheWall is a 1982 British
live-action and animated musical
drama film directed by Alan Parker
and based on the 1979 Roger Waters’
Pink Floyd conceptual double album
of the same title.
 This film is an audio visual depiction
of the whole album, from beginning
to the end, which developed the film
language in an experimental way to
create a 95 minutes musical film
with no dialogues.

20.  Michael Jackson’s Thriller is a short film music video directed by American film maker John
Landis after the success of his 1981 film American Werewolf in London.
 This was at the time an unconventional approach to music videos, as it tis treated under the
same narrative premise as a film.
 At the same time,TOTP started to censor video content, so another approach was to produce a
video that would be banned or edited and so using controversy and publicity to promote the
release. Early examples of this tactic were Duran Duran's "Girls on Film"

21. 11/07/2019 21
‘Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend’
from Gentlemen prefer blondes
(Howard Hawks, 1953)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g__ANxxwKIk
Madonna ‘Material Girl’ (Mary Lambert ,1985)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3wYIjI8WcI

22.  Research further and use information on the history
of music videos and create your own timeline up to
the present day, using your own examples to explain
the evolution of the relationship between music and
film.
 For each major development, explain how it has
affected the way people consume music videos.
How has the purpose of music films changed
through time?

23. 1. Did you like this music video?
Why?
2. Does the video follow Goodwin’s
theory?Yes/No- in what way?
3. Discuss the use of technical
elements in this music video.
4. Why do you think the music video
contributed to the success of the
single?