Music Video - A Little Bit Of History
An American electrician/photographer George Thomas was
the first person to introduce images to music. He gathered printed images onto
glass slides and gave it colour by colouring in traditionally before projecting
the series of still images onto a screen with a live musical performance
playing in the back - It was called ‘The Little Lost Child’.
An estimate of thirty years later, musical films were
taking off radically. Spooney Melodies, formed by Warner Brothers in 1930 –
1931, was a series of five musical shorts, which were combinations of art-deco
animation and live-action footage targeted to showcase the popular tunes at the
times. The length of the shorts extended to around 6 minutes (twice the length
of today’s regular pop videos), however, only one of the series survived – ‘Crying
For The Carolines’.
In the late 1950s, Cameca, a company founded in
Courbevoie, France, came up with the Scopitone. It was a jukebox that united a
16mm film section. Soon, Italy began to follow suit with the Cinebox, which
made its way across the oceans to USA in 1960s. At this stage, the Cinebox
became the Cinejukebox, which allowed Francis Ford Coppolla invest in the
Scopitone. By 1967, jukeboxes dissolved; however, the passion for music videos
was unstoppable.
I
n the mid-70s, Australian TV shows Countdown and Sounds
were busy popularising music. Conversely, music videos had restrictive rules on
how many non-live ‘outsourced clips’ they could use in the programme. Sounds
presenter and DJ Graham Webb hired a new director named Russell Mulcahy, who
shot videos for songs he wanted to feature on his show that didn’t already have
their own promo clips. This is when The Buggles’ music video ‘Video Killed The
Radio Star’ was produced, making it the first music video ever to be played on
MTV in 1981.
Since 1980s, music video channels have become a norm. One
of the firsts among MTV was Vh1 and Canada’s MuchMusic. In 1984, MTV launched
their first Music Awards, aka VMAs. Directors of music videos grew ambitious –
John Landis’ creation for Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ might have cost a
staggering half a million dollars to produce, but managed to open the way for
African-American artists in the music video industry.
Nowadays, MTV is more focused on reality shows rather
than music due to new sources of music content that have picked up from TV onto
Internet; e.g. YouTube. This site is now stated as the first port of call for
anybody to stream their favourite artists’ music videos. The video for Lady Gaga’s
hit, ‘Bad Romance’ became the most-viewed video in 2010, not only YouTube but
on the entire Internet. And now, thanks to the development of the smartphones,
more people than ever can check out videos anywhere, anytime.
