We got to choose between one of three topics to discuss this week.
But since I didn't particularly feel like discussing and linking you to scopitone videos (reeeally cheesy early music videos, in case you're curious), and I'm not exactly a big... purchaser of CDs, therefore not knowing a lot of album covers (I know, I'm horrible), I thought this week I'd talk about music videos and why costs and styles have changed over time.
If you look at early music videos like Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody:
The production quality was nothing to write home about. In fact, in the early days, music videos were virtually unheard of, so when they started off of course things were a little rocky. Mostly just band members singing the songs and miming playing their instruments. Boring by today's standards, but probably why they were relatively inexpensive to produce. All you needed were the band members, their instruments and a few fancy light effects to get the early music video audience excited.
Let's look at the first video that played on MTV:
Video Killed the Radio Star. Here we're starting to see a lot more of visual effects (the lighting on the singer, the explosion of the radio), more elaborate costumes and settings, hiring actors other than the artist's themselves to be in the video. I don't know how much this cost to make, but I'm guessing it was the most expensive video ever at that time. Without even the actual production costs, hiring the people responsible for them probably cost more than a pretty penny, that's for sure. It's fitting with MTV's style of fast paced quick-editing energetic motion.
As music videos became more mainstream in the 90s we saw the beginning of music videos with actual plots in them and outrageous production quality. As an example, here's a classic from my pre-teenhood N Sync with Bye Bye Bye (embedding diabled by request on all of them, weird!). Right off the bat we can see how much money was spent on this just by looking at the marionette effect they used on the band. The video then proceeds into flashing through about five different sets with lots of different things going on like choreographed dance sequences, dangerous stunts, weird lighting effects, and driving fast cars. All while telling a story of a guy escaping a girl who plays games with him. Videos still continue in this strain of flashy expensive looking story-telling but with the advent of YouTube, home-made looking videos are getting more popular.
We go to OKGo as an example of one of the first big hits using this style of video with Here it Goes Again (they did one before this, but I like this song better):
While their dance sequence is choreographed, it was apparently done by one of the band member's sisters and they filmed it themselves. This cut all costs down to zero, still with an original (if not tongue-and-cheek) approach to music video production. Up and coming bands have a hard time footing the bill for outrageous costs of videos like N sync's we just saw, so YouTube is a great way to get themselves out there. This of course, brings up the issue of whether it's more important to have publicity or to make money, which has been a question since people started sharing files on the internet.
It's been largely because of advances in technology and interest in the medium that music videos have progressed the way that they have. Video may not have killed the radio star if things hadn't progressed the way they had.
On that cheesy note, check back in a few days when I post my animation assignment!
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