The History Of Music Videos A2 Research Zack Quinn

1. The History of Music
Videos
By Zack Quinn

2. What is a Music Video?
• A Music Video is a short film/video that accompanies a
complete piece of music.
• Modern music videos were primarily made and used to
market the product to increase the sale of recordings.

3. An Early Example – Bessie Smith
1929
• The Blues singer Bessie
Smith appeared in a ‘two-
reel’ short film called
Saint Louis Blues,
featuring a dramatized
performance of her hit
song. It was shown in
theatres in America which
promoted her song.

4. • Music videos are also called promotion
videos (or promos), due to the fact that this
is their main use.
• Sometimes they are called short-form music
videos to distinguish them from full length
movies consisting entirely of music. An
example of this is shown on the next slide.

5. Fantasia
• Fantasia was a 1940 release by Walt Disney, it
was an animated film lasting 126 minutes and it
was based around famous scores of classical
music.

6. Early music videos and promos
• The early music videos/promos
were filmed from the 1930’s
onwards, again being used by
Walt Disney. Like Fantasia his
‘Silly Symphonies’ were built
around music.

7. Continued…
• Like Disney, early ‘Looney Tunes’ cartoons by The
Warner Brothers were initially based around
certain songs from the Warner Bros. upcoming
musical films.

8. 1950’s
• In 1956 Tony Bennett was filmed walking along
The Serpentine in Hyde Park, London as his
recording of “Strangers in Paradise” played, the
film was distributed and played on TV stations,
he claims to have made the first music video.

9. 1960’s
• In 1960 the Scopitone
was made. Its function
was that it was a
visual jukebox, with an
image shown below, it
resulted in a greater
effort to produce
music videos to
accompany its use.

10. 60’s Continued…
• The Beatles being influential as ever in their
1964 motion picture “A Hard Days Night” set the
basic visuals seen in many music videos today,
and the techniques used have influenced many
in the years following.

11. Modern Era
• The key innovation in development of modern
music videos was the developments in Video
Recording and Editing, with Chroma-Key and
portable cameras being the most influential.

12. Portable Camera’s
• The use of portable cameras made the
production of music videos at a very low cost
achievable which allowed many acts to produce
promos quickly to help their sales. It also helped
many unknown acts grow their fan-base which
was previously much harder

13. Modern Continued…
• By the mid-1980’s releasing a video with a single
became standard, however to stand out acts
started providing huge budgets to accompany
them. An Example of this is “Can You Feel It” –
The Jackson 5.

14. 1970’s
• In the UK the importance of Top Of The Pops to
promote a single created even more innovation
and competition. It had a limit on the number of
videos it could show, but the videos created
great exposure. Therefore budgets rose and new
techniques flourished.

15. 1980’s
• In 1981, MTV launched with the first video aired
being “Video killed the Radio Star” by Buggles.
• David Bowie also got his first number one in
nearly a decade due to the eye catching promo
for “Ashes to Ashes”

16. Continued…
• Artists started to use more sophisticated effects
in their videos, and added storylines or plots.
Michael Jackson was a pioneer of this with his
song Thriller that had a clear beginning, middle
and end.

17. MTV
• Music Videos in the mid
1980’s became central
to marketing. Acts like
Madonna were greatly
successful from them,
however there is an
argument that the
necessity for a physical
image of music detracts
from the ‘true artist’

18. Music Video Today
• In the new IT era, music videos are extremely
popular. With artists like Woodkid releasing a
‘saga’ of videos with interlinking storylines, the
modern era has taken music videos to the next
level.