A brief history:
1800s:
When sheet music publishers still ran the music business, Edward B. Marks and Joe Stern hired electrician George Thomas and various performers to promote sales of their song The Little Lost Child. Thomas projected a series of still images on a screen simultaneously with live performances in what became a popular form of entertainment known as the illustrated song. This has been termed the first music video. Even today, many music videos and much contemporary television still use series of still images accompanied by song.
1900s/The Beatles:
One of the earliest performance clips in 1960s pop was the promo film made by The Animals for their breakthrough 1964 hit "House Of The Rising Sun". This high-quality colour clip was filmed in a studio on a specially-built set; it features the group in a lip-synched performance, depicted through an edited sequence of tracking shots, closeups and longshots, as singer Eric Burdon, guitarist Hilton Valentine and bassist Chas Chandler walked around the set in a series of choreographed moves.
Music Videos really broke through since 1964 with the Beatles and the release of their first feature film 'A Hard Days Night' which contains a number of musical sequences which had a huge influence.
The colour promotional clips for "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane", made in early 1967 and directed by Peter Goldman took the promotional film format to a new level. They used techniques borrowed from underground and avant garde film, including reversed film and slow motion, dramatic lighting, unusual camera angles and color filtering added in post-production. Reflecting the fact that these studio masterpieces were impossible for the group to perform live, their psychedelic mini-films illustrated the songs in an artful, impressionistic manner rather than trying to simulate an idealised performance or depict a narrative or plot.
At the end of 1967 the group released their third film, the one hour, made-for-television project Magical Mystery Tour; it was written and directed by the group and first broadcast on the BBC on Boxing Day 1967. Although poorly received at the time for lacking a narrative structure, it showed the group to be accomplished music video makers in their own right. It included elaborate edited sequences for the new songs featured in the film and the clips for "I Am The Walrus" and "Your Mother Should Know" have been screened many times on music TV shows in later years.
1980s:
Music Videos went mainstream. In 1981, the U.S. video channel MTV launched, airing "Video Killed the Radio Star" and beginning an era of 24-hour-a-day music on television. With this new outlet for material, the music video would, by the mid-1980s, grow to play a central role in popular music marketing. Many important acts of this period, most notably Adam and the Ants, Duran Duran and Madonna, owed a great deal of their success to the skillful construction and seductive appeal of their videos.
(THE ABOVE RESEARCH IS TAKEN FROM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_video)
The main purpose of a video is to promote the artist and leave the audience remembering the song. However, a music video serves other purposes aimed for by the creators; entertainment.
Quotes for the Music:
'Music is the vernacular of the human soul.'
Author: Geoffrey Latham
'Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.'
Author: Charlie Parker
'Where words fail, music speaks.'
Author: Hans Christian Anderson
'Joy, sorrow, tears, lamentation, laughter — to all these music gives voice, but in such a way that we are transported from the world of unrest to a world of peace, and see reality in a new way, as if we were sitting by a mountain lake and contemplating hills and woods and clouds in the tranquil and fathomless water.'
Author: Albert Schweitzer
Music Video Quotes:
- 'The visual must be predetermined, but the emotion can't be.'
- 'When you shoot on film. you have to make your choice as you shoot.'
- 'I looked at the rhythms, and I replicated an abstraction, which made my videos closer to what the musicians usually meant in the beginning. I could never be exact in my work, and that was a good thing.'
-'They didn't have to be filled out with fast editing or crazy angles, so that was one of my first rules: Not necessarily to get that nostalgic look, but more to have a commitment to the shot'.
- We'll do a crazy video of a great song that people can actually dance to.'
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