Prior to the launch of MTV and music television channels, music videos were known and constructed as promotional films.The beginning of music television in the mid-70s was significant in popularising the music video genre.
However it was MTV with its launch in 1981 airing the significative Video Killed The Radio Star that gave the music video the right platform to grow in popular music marketing. beginning an era of 24/7 music on television.
Many acts of the 80s capitalized on this, owing a great deal of their success to the seductive appeal of their videos (Madonna, Duran Duran, Michael Jackson, Grace Jones, Adam & The Ants, Prince, Wham, Madness, etc etc)
Duran Duran's video work was influential in several ways.
They filmed in exotic locales like Sri Lanka and Antigua, creating memorable images that were radically different from the then-common low budget "band-playing-on-a-stage" videos.
Rather than simply playing their instruments, the band participated in mini-storylines (often taking inspiration from contemporary movies: "Hungry Like The Wolf" riffs on Raiders of the Lost Ark, "The Wild Boys" on The Road Warrior, etc.).
Videos were obviously headed in this direction already, but Duran Duran led the trend with a style, featuring quick editing, arresting graphic design, and surreal-to-nonsensical image inserts, that drew attention from commentators and spawned a wealth of imitators.
The music video for "Slave to the Rhythm" features the hit single version of the song, billed as "Ladies and Gentlemen: Miss Grace Jones" in the album track listing. It largely consists of new footage, yet uses excerpts from Jones' previously released music videos as well as her Citroën CX TV advertisement. Included are also still pictures of some of Jones' most iconic looks. The music video was directed by Jean-Paul Goude.
"Pale Shelter" was filmed in early 1983 in Los Angeles, California, USA. The video is notable for a scene in which Orzabal and Smith walk on the tarmac of an airport towards an image of a giant iron burn, with steam coming off the image as they walk over it. It was also notable for a scene in which they walk headfirst into a sea of flying paper airplanes, with one of them hitting Orzabal directly in the eye. The video was directed by music video pioneer Steve Barron.
Two videos were made for the song. The one above is the second video directed by Steve Barron, and filmed at Kim's Café and on a sound stage in London, in 1985.
The video used a pencil-sketch animation / live-action combination called rotoscoping, in which the live-action footage is traced-over frame by frame to give the characters realistic movements.
The final scene is based upon Ken Russel's movie Altered States
In the early 80s, directors and the acts they worked with began to explore and expand the form and style of music videos, using more sophisticated effects in their clips, mixing film and video, and adding a storyline or plot to the music video.
Occasionally videos were made in a non-representational form, in which the musical artist was not shown. Since music videos are mainly intended to promote the artist, such videos are comparatively rare; however here's an early example of this directed by David Mallet for David Bowie and Queen's hit single "Under Pressure".
The music video was directed by duo Godley & Creme and was praised for its simple black-and-white cinematography. Both MTV (1999) and VH1 (2002) named it as one of the best music videos ever
"Cry"'s groundbreaking and very popular 1985 video featured faces blended into each other using analog cross-fading, anticipating the digital effect of morphing, later used in a very similar way in Michael Jackson's 1991 video, "Black or White".
The music video for "Slave to the Rhythm" features the hit single version of the song, billed as "Ladies and Gentlemen: Miss Grace Jones" in the album track listing. It largely consists of new footage, yet uses excerpts from Jones' previously released music videos as well as her Citroën CX TV advertisement. Included are also still pictures of some of Jones' most iconic looks. The music video was directed by Jean-Paul Goude.
The music video, directed by duo Godley & Creme and featuring robot-like movable sculptures dancing, spinning and even walking in time to the music in a "virtual house" in London, England, garnered five MTV Video Music Awards in 1984, including Best Concept Video and Best Special Effects. The video is unique in that it was edited to the sounds of the scratching of the composition, and it employed new techniques never seen in a music video up until then. Hancock himself appears and plays keyboard only as a black-and-white image on a television, which is smashed on the pavement outside the front door of the house in the closing shot.
"Sledgehammer" spawned a widely popular and influential music video commissioned by Tessa Watts at Virgin Records, directed by Stephen R. Johnson and produced by Adam Whittaker. Aardman Animations (of Wallace and Gromit fame) and the Brothers Quay provided claymation, pixilation, and stop motion animation that gave life to images in the song. The video ended with a large group of extras jerkily rotating around Gabriel, among them: Gabriel's daughters Anna and Melanie, the animators themselves, and director Stephen Johnson's girlfriend. Also included were six women who posed as the back-up singers of the song. Gabriel lay under a sheet of glass for 16 hours while filming the video one frame at a time. Notably, two oven-ready turkeys, headless and featherless, were animated using stop-motion and shown dancing along to the synthesized flute solo in the middle of the song. This section was animated by Nick Park of Aardman Animations who was refining his work in plasticine animation at the time. The style was later used again in the video for Gabriel's other successful single from the album Big Time.
