Blog 1: Music Video
- luhoward
- Nov 24, 2023
- 3 min read
Updated: Apr 18, 2024
"Video Killed The Radio Star" was the first music video played on MTV in 1979. As the title says, radio and CD was the primary medium for distributing music to the public before the 1980s, when music videos were not a thing until musicians discovered the promotion opportunities behind this new technology recorded on film tape.
The fact that every aspect of art will be merging into each other as technology develops drives the birth of music videos, which audiences are both stimulated by hearing and seeing. This makes the MV a perfect way to build better musician branding, where fans are able to contact with musicians at a much closer distance than ever before. The musicians will be able to present their ideology much more clearly in comparison to just having the lyrics.
⬆️Both of these have a combination of music and video. The former is a tape record of Buddy Rich playing in public, and the second is Benny Greb's promotion video for his album "Greb Fruit". There's a vast difference between live session recording and music video. As you can see, the audience naturally feels distanced from Buddy Rich as he's performing in public. It is hard to feel any emotion bound with him. However, Beeny Greb recorded his video in an isolated space, dragging the distance between the audience and him closer. This will integrate the audience into his performance more efficiently, thus making audiences connect with him better, achieving better market campaign.
Sometimes, a Music video follows the length of the song. Sometimes, music videos are made into a microfilm.
Thriller is a song lasting only 5 minutes long, while the MV of Michael Jackson is 13 minutes long. The MV literarily have an entire plot and a logical narrative structure. Michael Jackson changed the structure of the song as well. If you have listened to the original track, you'll find all the verses and chorus were shuffled around
Looking at Shape of You, you'll probably see that they used the original track and did all the B-roll, depending on the music.
While watching the MV, you might discover a variety range of exaggerations in the context.
Underdog by Kasabian is a performance video. What it is trying to tell with the B-roll is a bit weird. But anyways...They do stuff pretty exaggerated.
In a performance video, it's just people performing. I hate Kasabian for making this MV so much because they ruined the song with footage that shows no connection to the lyrics showing the theme of failure and discouragement.
Well yeah...I mean you'll also got performance videos of jazz instrumentalists playing SERIOUS BEBOP where they are just....playing.....
This is still categorized as a Music video and is used to promote the album Pulse.
Most performance videos now include a certain amount of narrative and abstract content to keep the audience interested.
Lamb of God merges a plot into a performance video where you get A roll for the band's performance on stage and a B-roll show for a psycho family going wild.
The number of concept MV has developed vastly in the present few years due to the advance of technology.
And there we go, the quintessence of weirdness, Lady Gaga - 911, one of my favourite concept MV by all time. The mv also presents a narrative timeline and it's connotated deeply with various religious concepts presented through props and had multiple cross media references in the MV
The most obvious one is the parody of Virgin Mary but holding a body and nobody knows what it presents.
Gods from Western religions are also presented. The semiotics could not be clearly identified therefore is the characteristic of concept MVs.
The production of the MV is also up to cinematic standard where you get great cinematic level light and colouring. And I'm pretty sure they got a crane to shot this since a lot of the rising and descending shot is almost impossible to achieve with human power.
These kind of big productions have been increasingly significant in the music video production area. Not only the band crew are involved in the production, there will be other characters for examplethe woman in Deutschland MV symbolising the duitisc; and a lot of other solider and stuff like that.
Comments